Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study

ISPs are required to give estimated primetime speeds you can expect for a given plan.

E.g. for my 100mbs plan, they tell me that in my area, I can expect 82mbs during evening peak.

We also have some ISPs who are being transparent about over provisioning and even go as far as stopping selling into an area until they acquire more bandwidth into a node.

More on topic, this is being caused by companies milking their old networks unwilling to upgrade.

I suspect it is due to execs believing their underlings when they're told their network upgrades were supposed to alleviate capacity problems at a great cost.

Fact is, usage is evolving, go to somewhere like south Korea and YouTube streaming 4k on your phone during your commute is the norm. People have the bandwidth there, and they use it.

Here, people don't have the bandwidth, so they don't, but they would.

ISPs don't seem to realise this and think it's a select few ruining the service for the whole with their pesky streaming. When really it's just changing customer needs and reluctance to serve.

Of course during the day when people actually use the network it's down to 0.5Gbit, down to 0.3Gbit during prime Netflix hours.

Which is about as vague as it can get.

To make things more concrete: What would a gigabyte of mobile traffic cost if network operators were to optimize for low per-GB cost?

> There are two types of protocols: those that adjust the quantity of data sent depending on conditions, and those that don't. Streaming video does -- if throughput drops, it changes video encoding to send fewer bytes. Most other protocols don't -- they just get slow but they still need to send all the bytes eventually. There's a solid argument for throttling the first kind when congestion hits.

Except: There really is not, especially not between customers, which is what this discussion is about.

It is not some random accident that video streaming happens to be the thing that adapts to available bandwidth: That is precisely because it eats so much bandwidth compared to everything else. Which also means that throttling it in favor of other applications between different customers is actually not really useful. If you have one customer that watches a video stream and one (comparable, end-user) customer sending emails, then the email user will pretty much always have lower bandwidth requirements than their fair share anyway.

Also, it simply is not up to you to decide what a customer should value. If you sell a customer a contract that promises a certain bandwidth that is sufficient for high quality video streaming, then it is your job to provide that bandwidth at any time, except for rare occasions when/where unexpected demand hits you. It is not up to you to decide that a low-quality stream ought to be good enough, or that someone else's emails are more important than their high-quality video stream, if they are paying you for the same level of service. If the customer thought that that would be good enough, they would have bought a lower-bandwidth plan. If you don't offer a lower-bandwidth plan, then that is your fault.

Congestion should never be a standard condition in your network, if it is, what you are doing is essentially fraud by selling people a service that you don't intend to perform. The fact that it might be technically impossible to perform the service doesn't change that, it's still your fault if you know that you can't perform the service, but you enter into contracts anyway. Congestion should be an exceptional condition, and as such should never be so massive as to have any advantage from using application-dependent throttling between customers.

>How is that a reason for anything, and what is it actually supposed to be a reason for?

I was unclear. I'm suggesting that carriers are in fact, throttling all bulk data, but reporting is focused on video. Allow a sizable burst of data at the beginning of a connection and then start rate limiting, and most people won't notice except for on videos.

This was probably the simplest, least noticable, least costly intervention to reduce peak congestion and provide a consistent experience across the carrier network.

Is it fair? Maybe, if applied to all traffic

Is it clear and transparent? No, clearly not.

Does it allow for the network to be used to capacity? No, not unless the limits were modulated based on current use, which doesn't seem to be the case.

Is it good for customers? Unclear -- to the extent you can watch good enough videos using less of your data quota, that might be a good thing; to the extent that you spend more time downloading updates, that's probably not good, but would need analysis of battery impact traded off with better push latency if the radio is kept on for other reasons. Also, to the extent that this throttling provides better availability in congested area, that's a plus for users.

Seems unlikely to me, but who knows ...

> Also, to the extent that this throttling provides better availability in congested area, that's a plus for users.

If you are being throttled, that's obviously not increasing availability in any meaningful sense, so, no, it's not. What would be a plus for users would be adding capacity. Not performing the contractually agreed service is the exact opposite of "increasing availability".

Overall, the problem with all of this is that it borders on fraud. There would be no problem with selling low-bandwidth plans, if that is the only thing you can offer at economical prices. Or offering the user the choice to throttle certain services so as to conserve bandwidth. The problem is that carriers kinda-sorta sell a service and then don't do what they kinda-sorta promised. And a big part of the problem is that everyone frames this as "trying to help the customer by limiting abusers", or something similar, when really, the only abuser is the carrier selling a service they don't intend to perform, because they would have to spend money to do that.

The important part is not whether some traffic is throttled, the important part is who makes the decision as to what gets throttled. If I buy 1 Mb/s mobile IP access, and then the carrier throttles my connection to 1 Mb/s, that's my decision. If I buy "LTE full-speed IP access", and then the carrier throttles my videos to 1 Mb/s with no option to opt out, it is not.