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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

To me, the real question isn’t if the mobile carriers throttle video, it’s if they equally throttle video. Video throttling has been happening for a long time. But what I’d really like to know is if a carrier (say ATT) was throttling Netflix, but not their own DirecTV app. DirecTV is already zero rated on ATT, but I’m not sure if it is also throttled.

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Precisely. It's fair to opt to throttle large downloads and video streaming, if that's what they need to do to ensure that other users have fast access to other services like maps, search, emails and so on. That's completely reasonable, no one user should be allowed to saturate the connection to a cell tower with a video stream or torrent download.

I can understand that it's easier to just select the biggest sources of traffic and throttle them, but that doesn't make it okay. The least they could do to show good faith is throttle their own service.

No it is not fair or reasonable. If I get a certain plan I should be able to utilize it to the full extent. If a company is incapable of providing the service they should not sell that service plan.

I sort of see your point, but what you're arguing is that they should just change the wording of the contracts. You're not going to get what you want anyway.

We ran into that issue with the marketing department and upper management when I work at a telco. We where starting to sell 3G USB modems, and "plan" was that we'd start to push internet via 3G, because it was 7Mbit at the time and that would be plenty fast. There would be no need to sell ADSL connections anymore.

The issue, which the people responsible for the network pointed out is that the 7Mbit was SHARED. It assumed that the user was alone on that tower. Also there's a limit on the connection to the tower it self, these are fiber now, so not a major issue, but a limiting factor at some point.

Internet via 4G is certainly faster than 7Mbit now, but it's still a shared capacity. If you surf the net, check your emails and such, it's in burst so it's fine to share. Streaming is you using a constant amount of traffic for a sustained period of time and that's not what the cell network is designed to do.

That is fine if I don't get exactly what I want, but companies should not be allowed to blatantly lie and over promise. Do I get to violate the contract for the service I was unable to utilize? Companies need to stop over promising and under delivering and hiding behind a 20 page one sided contract.

I don't really see where the blatant lie is. ISPs never advertise dedicated speed and most have long documents describing how they manage their network.

What do you want their marketing to actually say?

But should an ISP even be able to see what the connections they're offering are being used for? I guess they can at least see IP addresses even when it's a https connection.

Pretty damn hard to route something when you don't know where it is going.

What they could do it look at the target device. If a device have use X Mbit/s over the last Y seconds sustained, then just start throttling it until the sustained traffic stop and then un-throttle. In that case they don't need to look at the actual traffic, just how much you're generating. That would also hit all services equally.

I think people would mostly choose a cheaper shaped connection over a more expensive best effort connection, so I wonder if laws preventing shaping are a good idea.

(Laws requiring clear advertising and disclosure are a great idea...)

I have never understood how it is fair or open that a few providers are allowed to hold the rest of the Internet hostage because they are popular. Why should downloading a random file be throttled because people like to watch YouTube in 4k on their phone? It seem reasonable that someone should pay extra for that, whether that is Google or the consumer. Unfortunately the Internet is very messy and manual, so the current solution is lacking but that doesn't mean that the problem isn't real.

> That's completely reasonable, no one user should be allowed to saturate the connection to a cell tower with a video stream or torrent download.

That's reasonable but I don't see why this requires throttling specific services or types. By all means ensure that it's fair for everyone but maybe my file download is just as important as your email. Why should all file downloads be slowed down?

We know for a fact that TMobile throttles streaming video to 480p [1], which has always been fairly clear and not too deeply hidden.

[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/binge-on-streaming-video ('What is Optimized Streaming')

What’s not so easy is going through their approval process to become zero rated. They claim to be equal to anyone that wants to implement “their tech” but are reluctant to work with anyone that isn’t a large company.

Note: that was a few years ago and I have no idea what’s changed. I gave up trying to deal with them.

t-mobile has mostly gotten rid of zero rating. Zero rating only matters today on legacy plans and hence a reason they aren't adding any new services to it.

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