Slashdot Mirror
Senators Ask Four Major Carriers About Video Slowdowns (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Three U.S. Senate Democrats today asked the four major wireless carriers about allegations they've been throttling video services and -- in the case of Sprint -- the senators asked about alleged throttling of Skype video calls. Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent the letters to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile, noting that recent research using the Wehe testing platform found indications of throttling by all four carriers.
"All online traffic should be treated equally, and Internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise," the senators wrote. Specifically, the Wehe tests "indicated throttling on AT&T for YouTube, Netflix, and NBC Sports... throttling on Verizon for Amazon Prime, YouTube, and Netflix... throttling on Sprint for YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Skype Video calls... [and] delayed throttling, or boosting, on T-Mobile for Netflix, NBC Sports, and Amazon Prime by providing un-throttled streaming at the beginning of the connection, and then subsequently throttling the connection," the senators' letters said.
"All online traffic should be treated equally, and Internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise," the senators wrote. Specifically, the Wehe tests "indicated throttling on AT&T for YouTube, Netflix, and NBC Sports... throttling on Verizon for Amazon Prime, YouTube, and Netflix... throttling on Sprint for YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Skype Video calls... [and] delayed throttling, or boosting, on T-Mobile for Netflix, NBC Sports, and Amazon Prime by providing un-throttled streaming at the beginning of the connection, and then subsequently throttling the connection," the senators' letters said.
"All online traffic should be treated equally, and Internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise."
You can't just take something out of it's context and make a meaningful argument.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
No, that is NOT what Net Neutrality advocates are asking for. Net Neutrality means that ISPs should be agnostic about the DESTINATION, i.e. that VoIP traffic to Skype should not be slower than VoIP traffic to Facebook Messenger or whatever.
No (sane) NN law should ever be written in a way that prevents differing prioritization of different classes of traffic, e.g. ensuring that latency-sensitive data, such as VoIP traffic gets sent without delay even if it means that non-latency-sensitive data, such as bulk downloads, are slower, even by a few seconds.
Because a five second difference in your download time could make the difference between somebody else's phone call being perfect and dropping out over and over. Services that require low latency should get priority, because if slowed down, they become unusable. Other services, if slowed down, do not become significantly less usable. The assumption is that every user will eventually do something for which latency matters, whether it is gaming, Skype, or even just video streaming, though the extent to which latency matters varies, obviously, depending on what you're doing.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Right, this exactly. All the customers connected to the network should get a maximum bandwidth allotment of one portion of the total bandwidth divided by the amount of connected clients. Latency should not be fucked with, period. Traffic should not be prioritized, period, above everything getting the exact same priority.
Any counter-arguments to this are expressly for the purpose of allowing situations where carriers can overbook their networks and shift the blame around between the customers.
>"They need to upgrade their effin network then. Just like they pledged to do."
I agree. But no matter how much bandwidth is upgraded, people can quickly suck it all away. Now 4K video. Now 8K. Now 3D 8K with surround sound. Etc.
There is always a limit to bandwidth, which if hit, will affect other people on the network. It isn't evil to try and manage congestion to keep things working well. It *is* evil to try and manipulate the traffic for other "agendas".
QoS only ever affects network traffic in any significant way when there is congestion. If there is congestion, the correct solution is to increase capacity, not to throttle some traffic. That traffic is paid for! You oversold your bandwidth too much and need to upgrade. QoS is fine on your own network with your own data. You can be as cheap as you want and use QoS to prioritize traffic that is important to you. An ISP however carries other people's paid for traffic and should absolutely treat it all equally. Yes, that means FTP gets the same priority as gaming packets. That is no problem at all unless you fail to upgrade the network to handle the traffic that your customers paid for. An ISP with regular bottlenecks on their network is doing it wrong.
You read his post and know that isn't what he is arguing for. Why are you trying to twist his argument and confuse the issue?