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Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

news.northeastern.edu

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Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#71

Post by PenguinCoder »

rbritton wrote: post #17
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #10

Netflix blocks PIA, a VPN, from accessing its servers. Rights holders’ unchecked power is the problem. Abstracting their power through net neutrality terminology distracts from their damage and promotes their cause. If you want a shortcut to the solution, it includes “how could I make Netflix indfifferent as to how I access their content?”

Netflix blocks virtually all VPS provider IP ranges, so you can’t even host your own VPN to work around it.

I'm really interested to see how they accomplished this. Considering PIA puts up new nodes pretty quickly, and doesn't have one congruent address space, how does Netflix detect PIA or other vpn users?

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#72

Post by close04 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #67
close04 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to guarantee a minimum speed but you have to advertise the relevant parameters that you can reach at least a certain percentage of the time. Saying just "up to" should only be allowed if you also use it for the pricing and the clients pay what they can. Saying "unlimited" should be allowed only with the dictionary definition. And all "limiting" conditions should be advertised the same way as the main o…

> You don't have to guarantee a minimum speed but you have to advertise the relevant parameters that you can reach at least a certain percentage of the time. But this still suffers from exactly the same problem, just in a statistical way. i.e., what if someone's frequently in a place that has poor signal? How are you going to predict what percentage of the time they'll be in such a situation?

Then you compensate that person for not being able to provide the service. Just as you'd expect in any other case when a service is not delivered. And if we're being honest, that's not actually the reason most of us get throttled. Most of the time it's not even network management, it's just a money grab.

I don't intend to go into the technicalities because they're irrelevant. The point is they should offer a quality level at least "statistically".

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#74

Post by mehrdadn »

close04 wrote: post #72
mehrdadn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't have to guarantee a minimum speed but you have to advertise the relevant parameters that you can reach at least a certain percentage of the time. But this still suffers from exactly the same problem, just in a statistical way. i.e., what if someone's frequently in a place that has poor signal? How are you going to predict what percentage of the time they'll be in such a situation?

Then you compensate that person for not being able to provide the service. Just as you'd expect in any other case when a service is not delivered. And if we're being honest, that's not actually the reason most of us get throttled. Most of the time it's not even network management, it's just a money grab. I don't intend to go into the technicalities because they're irrelevant. The point is they should offer a quality…

I'm not trying to justify what they're currently doing either. What I'm trying to explain is that making something that legally works the way we all want it to is a different and much tougher problem than merely being able to imagine a world in which the current practices don't exist.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#75

Post by lrem »

hguhghuff wrote: post #73

Internet companies need to refuse to serve ISPs who throttle. “Oh we can’t get YouTube google and Netflix on this ISP? We’ll leave for one who does provide them.” Restricting services can cut both ways.

That's pretty much what happened in France a few years back. SFR (I think it was SFR, could have been one of the others, sorry) wanted more money from Google, to which Google said nope. I don't even know how that one resolved, but for quite a while many folk in the office had no YouTube at home.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#76

Post by pas »

close04 wrote: post #65
belorn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article brings up that. The throttling was not done in order to ease congested network traffic. It is not a response to hotspots of high traffic, nor is it even classification of data types such as torrent and video usage. If you use Boost ISP and watching sports on NBCSport it will work fine but watching the same match later on youtube is not. If you sit at CSpire and watch a paid movie on Youtube Red you will g…

This kind of throttling is done to squeeze more money from anything crossing their network. All ISPs want a piece of the pie so they will charge at both ends anything coming in and anything going out to you.

Can customers/subscribers of the ISP sue for damages? I guess the ISP has a pretty defensive ToS though. :(

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#77

Post by thecatspaw »

mcny wrote: post #63
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure if Netflix had their way they would not have spent resources on doing a VPN check.

Why do they have to enforce VPN check for Netflix originals? It seems that Netflix does not own rights for Netflix originals? Wouldn't it be easier to simply say some videos have restrictions but these videos do not?

> Wouldn't it be easier to simply say some videos have restrictions but these videos do not

No. Restricting everything is easier than checking if a video needs to be restricted.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#78

Post by gsich »

lucb1e wrote: post #32
gsich wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix is the problem. Nobody is forcing them to implement a VPN check. Rights holder want this. Netflix just delivers.

From your own comment it sounds like rights holders are forcing them to implement a VPN check..?

No. Right holders want this. Netflix could just say no. Of course some stuff might not be available then, but at least their integrity would be intact.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#79

Post by nbhuik »

close04 wrote: post #65
belorn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article brings up that. The throttling was not done in order to ease congested network traffic. It is not a response to hotspots of high traffic, nor is it even classification of data types such as torrent and video usage. If you use Boost ISP and watching sports on NBCSport it will work fine but watching the same match later on youtube is not. If you sit at CSpire and watch a paid movie on Youtube Red you will g…

This kind of throttling is done to squeeze more money from anything crossing their network. All ISPs want a piece of the pie so they will charge at both ends anything coming in and anything going out to you.

That is just how the Internet works. Everyone is selling and buying access to networks. Whether directly or in the form of agreements. And most people are of course trying to get more for less. One could certainly wish that things would be different, but it isn't like they are doing something especially nefarious.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#80

Post by timr »

belorn wrote: post #52
sbr464 wrote: post #25

Years back, I operated a small ISP to serve a need until cable broadband arrived in the community. I had to monitor overall usage and throttle clients frequently with high torrent/video usage. It was also an issue with hotspots in RV Parks/campgrounds where there was a higher ratio of video usage. There are technical limitations to spectrum/bandwidth, I'm curious why this isn't mentioned more in discussions like thes…

The article brings up that. The throttling was not done in order to ease congested network traffic. It is not a response to hotspots of high traffic, nor is it even classification of data types such as torrent and video usage. If you use Boost ISP and watching sports on NBCSport it will work fine but watching the same match later on youtube is not. If you sit at CSpire and watch a paid movie on Youtube Red you will g…

"The article is not about congestion control but rather marketing choices where one streaming service is favored over the other within the captured market of an ISP customers."

I wonder if that's true, or this is simply a result of the peering agreements that content providers have engaged in since forever.

For those who don't know: if Netflix is colocated in the same datacenter(s) as CSPire, it's possible to "throw an ethernet cable over the cage wall" and make a direct connection to CSPire. This results in dramatically better bandwidth and latency, but requires significant up-front costs (it's also not possible for every provider to peer with every distributor, for logistical reasons).

As much as I believe in the concept of net neutrality, I feel like the conversation misses many of the technical nuances of the way the internet actually works. Peering is one example: you can have an entirely "neutral" internet, but still observe dramatic differences between one provider and another, based on your network location.

(Edit: now that I've read TFA, it's pretty clear that they're not talking about favoring providers, but rather, throttling entire classes of traffic. Which is a different discussion.)

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