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T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
41–50 of 127 posts
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#42I'm a little saddened to see the direction T-Mobile is headed with their plans. When I switched to Project Fi last year my T-Mobile unlimited plan was $70/mo. That included actual HD video, and LTE tethering. Now the equivalent plan (T-Mobile One+) is $90/mo, and that just gets you "unlimited HD day passes" which you have to remember to toggle every day if you want video that isn't 480p. What's even scarier to me is…
How can T-Mobile dictate what quality video you get?
As I understand it they're ultimately just doing traffic shaping.
If the edge of their network thinks you're downloading a video stream they'll throttle the throughput to ~3.5Mbps. This is approximately equivalent to a 480p stream, so intelligent streaming apps (e.g: Netflix, YouTube, et al.) will notice this and downgrade the quality to avoid buffer stalls.
On their new plan "T-Mobile One" this behavior is always on unless you opt out by purchasing an "HD Day Pass." (They upsell you on an add-on that gives you "free HD Day Passes" but you still have to activate them every day.)
On their previous plan "Simple Choice" the network behaves essentially the same, but it was behind a toggle called on your billing profile called "BingeON" whereby if it was shaping your traffic it would zero-rate it on your bill.
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One thing I'm not sure about is how they do traffic shaping in the face of transmitting the stream over HTTPS/TLS, perhaps it's just a whitelist of IPs for known services? (I know businesses get away with shaping/monitoring TLS traffic by using MITM proxies on the edge of the network; but that assumes control of the certificate truststore on your network's endpoints, which T-Mobile doesn't have.)
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
By not opting out of "BingeOn", they don't count 480p content or below towards your data cap. If you opt out, it counts against your data usage. It encourages users to only use as much data that's necessary to view a streaming video at the maximum quality most mobile devices support (Source IP block is used to determine content zero rating). I'm a realistic T-Mobile user for ~16 years, have no problem with their netw…
Actually, almost everyone got rid of unlimited, and had fair, net neutral data tiers. And then T-Mobile's deceptive marketing led everyone to follow suit. I understand that as a 16 year user, you're inclined to defend them, but this whole current trend was T-Mobile's idea. T-Mobile started zero rating certain types of apps, throttling people's video traffic, etc. "Uncarrier" is a whole new field of net neutrality vio…
I don't believe in net neutrality on wireless spectrum. Not all bits are created equally.
If you don't like the policy, there are at least three other national carriers to choose from. I'm exhausted from a vocal minority thinking their opinion matters in this regard.
The market has spoken, and does not care.
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#44I feel the problem is that marketing terminology is ill-regulated, so companies can make "natural", "unlimited", "fresh", "home-made", "organic", "life-time", "guaranteed", "green", etc. mean whatever they want them to mean and allows enough cover that consumers assume it means one thing while to industry if means quite another or very narrow interpretation.
This is rooted in the American culture: Americans are already used to things like this. For example here if you go to a restaurant, you will usually pay 30% more than the price that is displayed (tips + taxes).
But that's an example of the opposite. Americans (and really, everyone in modern societies) might be used to assumed, hidden costs.
If we buy a thing for $10, we expect that to be a baseline, as we may pay tax or gratuity on top of that. If I go to the store and buy something for $9.99, my mental calculation is that it may actually cost $10.70 or so with tax. If I go to a restaurant and buy a $20 steak, my expectation is that will probably cost $25.
But if I go to a restaurant and order a steak and they serve me a soy burger, that will not be acceptable. An "unlimited" plan not, in fact, being unlimited is different than what you've described.
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#45$48 million seems like a slap on the wrist. T-Mobile made $32 billion in revenue in 2015 and just posted $479 million in profit. I wish I could feel like these fines actually acted as a deterrent.
Now I hate TMobile for throttling me so many times over the last few years, BUT:
That's more than a slap on the wrist. It's 10% of their profit. How would you like to be fined 10% of your leftover money after your bills are paid? That's a decent chunk of skin.
I actually believe it's a pretty fair punishment. I believe comparing it to revenue is irrelevant because it's an extremely capital-intensive process. If it takes 32B to make 0.479B, their margin is about 1/64th!
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll just leave this here: https://boingboing.net/2016/09/22/i-have-found-a-secret-tunn...
Huh. Thanks for this. How are the speeds in major cities?
"[...] 4G/LTE bandwidth on Sprint's network."
Sprint claims an average of 3-6 Mbps[1]
[1] https://shop2.sprint.com/en/stores/popups/4G_coverage_popup....
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#47Here's the thing, I would much rather have reasonable throttling with unlimited data, then either $10.00 per GB, or worse yet, multiple times that as an overage penalty. Especially with a family plan when the non-bill-payers on the plan don't understand overage fees.
So the way I understood it (at least under the plan that I signed up for before "binge-on" was added), T-Mobile would charge $20 (on top of the regular voice/text plan) for 'unlimited' data. Then, after something like 25GB, they would prioritize data from users that were under that limit if there was congestion. So to me that is entirely reasonable in light of the fact that radio waves have physical limits on how many people can consume high bandwidth at the same time.
Of course, it would be nice if they spelled out all of this in their advertising and product literature (and if this was still the case with their current plans).
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#48What is the status on T-Mobile offering unlimited data usage from select sources (Binge On program)? I can stream as much (well, I guess up to 17Gb) data as I want so long as it's from their list of approved sources which allow throttling at 480 resolution. It feels absurd that this is how they operate, rather than just allowing unlimited data at say 3G speeds (rather than the throttled data rate which is at most 2G…
I'm really surprised this hasn't caused more of a Net Neutrality uproar, since it's essentially the worst case scenario. If you don't pay T-Mobile to be one of their approved partners, your service is punished by costing customers more money for the same amount of data.
I asked them how I can get media on my server part of their program and they laughed at me. They claim anyone can join too. And yes, I did go right to the fcc and complain.
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#49Here's the thing, I would much rather have reasonable throttling with unlimited data, then either $10.00 per GB, or worse yet, multiple times that as an overage penalty. Especially with a family plan when the non-bill-payers on the plan don't understand overage fees. So the way I understood it (at least under the plan that I signed up for before "binge-on" was added), T-Mobile would charge $20 (on top of the regular…
> Of course, it would be nice if they spelled out all of this in their advertising and product literature (and if this was still the case with their current plans).
Which is ultimately the problem here. They didn't spell this out or make explicit this practice.
I agree with you, it makes sense, and I find it acceptable...but they definitely should have made it obvious and well documented.
Re: T-Mobile will pay a $48M fine for throttling ‘unlimited data’ plans
#50$48 million seems like a slap on the wrist. T-Mobile made $32 billion in revenue in 2015 and just posted $479 million in profit. I wish I could feel like these fines actually acted as a deterrent.
Now I hate TMobile for throttling me so many times over the last few years, BUT: That's more than a slap on the wrist. It's 10% of their profit. How would you like to be fined 10% of your leftover money after your bills are paid? That's a decent chunk of skin. I actually believe it's a pretty fair punishment. I believe comparing it to revenue is irrelevant because it's an extremely capital-intensive process. If it ta…
I see your point. I wonder, though, which fundamental the fine should be compared to. I'm not sure if profit is really the right one. Of course I'm no expert.