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Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study

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Re: Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study

#161

Post by TheCoelacanth »

dboreham wrote: post #144
stochastic_monk wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I pay for compute on AWS, I get an SLA with guarantees. Why are citizens afforded any less?

You do realize that AWS SLA is about as much BS as the "unlimited" cell data plans we're discussing here, right? All it says is that if they fail to deliver service, with a bunch of exclusions that make it very unlikely they will ever do so, then you get to not pay for that service that you didn't get. http://aws.amazon.com/compute/sla/

That is very much more real than what you get from an ISP. If an ISP doesn't meet the advertised bandwidth, at best you get an apology. More likely you get nothing. You definitely aren't getting a refund for the service you didn't get.

Re: Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study

#162

Post by gruez »

dylan604 wrote: post #142
gruez wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Diminish everyone's usage proportionally? Provide a guaranteed minimum? A minimum per minute, per hour, or per day? Prioritize traffic based on type? Implement caps? Allow people to pay for more speed, higher caps, or both? In the case of limited bandwidth, the "fairest" way would be to enforce a moving average cap. The most economically efficient way would be some sort of dynamic price system[1]. >But since people…

And how is this indicated to the user? At least the ride hailing apps displayed their "surge pricing" before you used the service. As I'm traveling through town and being handed off to different cell towers, am I going to see a pop-up saying the current rate on this tower is XXXX amount and allow me to accept or not? The flexible invisible cost is just not a good thing for end users

>As I'm traveling through town and being handed off to different cell towers, am I going to see a pop-up saying the current rate on this tower is XXXX amount

Is there a reason why this can't be done? Have a carrier app that you can use to check the current rate, and that sends push notifications when the rate exceeds a rate that you've set. You can even do this through SMS so it doesn't take up any bandwidth.

>and allow me to accept or not?

Allow the user to set a maximum rate. If the current rate exceeds that rate, cut off data access. Allow the user to reactivate data or change the maximum through the app or through SMS.

>The flexible invisible cost is just not a good thing for end users

I never said it was the best approach, just the most efficient approach from a microeconomics point of view.

Re: Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study

#163

Post by jessaustin »

mikepurvis wrote: post #13
zacharycohn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people do not have another reasonable option to switch to.

It surprises me that most people in the US wouldn't have at least one cable and one DSL option. After all, cable TV is available most places, and everyone has a phone line (or is at least wired for one). Or is the issue rural locations which were never wired for cable because they all just got satellite dishes?

...rural locations which were never wired for cable because they all just got satellite dishes

This has reversed the actual cause and effect. Zero rural customers are served by cable. Some rural customers have satellite dishes.

There are numerous reasons why cablecos don't serve rural areas. The obvious reason is the expense that would be required to run a mile of copper for each customer. Less obvious reasons include the fact that if there is no municipal apparatus to target for corruption, the cableco business model sort of falls apart...

You don't even have to visit a rural area to see this. There are lots of satellite customers in cities and that fact hasn't chased off the cablecos.

Re: Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study

#164

Post by wang_li »

jedberg wrote: post #140
wang_li wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>appropriate pipes to get to where their customers want to go. This idea is nonsensical. What if I want to go to somewhere that is three times removed from my ISP. Comcast has zero capability to force some South Korean ISP that is providing services to some website to increase their bandwidth with their upstream who is peered with whoever owns the undersea cable that is peered with the company that peers with Comcast…

If everyone up to the network edge is willing to pay for the equipment to get the packets there, and your customers are asking for the data, then yes, you have an obligation to deliver what you promised to your customer.

They promised X mbps between the customer and the customer's provider's network.

Re: Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study

#165

Post by projektfu »

I see a number of people who use YouTube just to listen to music on their phone. If you have an unlimited plan it's cheaper than paying for Spotify. So instead of a cheap 128kbps stream they are sending full motion video for someone who isn't watching anyway. I am curious what portion of streaming this represents.

Re: Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study

#166

Post by Spooky23 »

mikepurvis wrote: post #13
zacharycohn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people do not have another reasonable option to switch to.

It surprises me that most people in the US wouldn't have at least one cable and one DSL option. After all, cable TV is available most places, and everyone has a phone line (or is at least wired for one). Or is the issue rural locations which were never wired for cable because they all just got satellite dishes?

Maybe 10-15 years ago. Today, the traditional telcos are just letting the cooper service rot.

In my city the copper service had a significant 3 week outage that when a CO switch failed. They would rather attrit the CWA people and pay a fine than maintain it. Verizon’s position is to wait for direct subsidy or 5G in urban areas.

Re: Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study

#167

Post by Spooky23 »

mikepurvis wrote: post #58
glitcher wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a large US city and have one cable provider as my only viable high speed option. The dsl provider which I would have preferred hasn't upgraded the last 50 meters of lines going to my house, and said they had no plans to. The top speed they could offer me was 3Mbps. EDIT: In comparison, the same dsl provider on streets that have had their lines upgraded offers 100Mbps plans for about $30 less per month than…

You'd think there might be a business opportunity in this kind of situation for an ultra low cost, short range WISP. Like, if you could identify a bunch of scenarios like this where last mile issues have left behind neighbourhoods where there might be a few dozen potential customers (identify using speedtest.net data or something?), it would be possible to plug in a box on a utility pole at the edge of the existing c…

The pole rentals are extremely expensive and the existing players aren’t required to play with you.

A few players like this tried to use streetlights for this sort of thing with WiFi. Hanging a WiFi point on a pole is outrageous unless the city owns the pole and plays ball.

Re: Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study

#168

Post by dehrmann »

bigdubs wrote: post #68
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so you have to throttle Not at all. TCP already does its own rate limiting without external throttling.

tcp doesn't work well for wireless because packet drops due to signal interference look like collisions

This is somewhat true, but there's a lot of work done in the data link layer to provide a robust connection. TCP falls over with packet loss of less that 1%[1], so it's not really good at that, anyway.

https://www.netcraftsmen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2012...

Re: Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study

#169

Post by dehrmann »

QUFB wrote: post #55
dehrmann wrote: post #38

Congestion is a real thing for LTE networks, so you have to throttle. There's only so much bandwidth over a shared medium.

I really, really hate to defend mobile carriers, but... Congestion is a real thing. Mobile subscribers are now using significantly more data due to video streaming, and wireless carriers aren't expanding their capacity fast enough. 5G won't help for most of CONUS. Millimeter wave 5G, which will help, will only be deployed in urban areas. Mid-band and low-band 5G will only increase spectrum efficiency around 20%. For…

> I really, really hate to defend mobile carriers, but...

For the most part, carriers sell unlimited, then throttle heavy users. While it's not honest, they're also not upselling those users on super unlimited plans. This makes me think carriers genuinely don't have the capacity for all this video. Without an upsell path, if they had the bandwidth, there'd by no incentive to throttle.

Re: Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study

#170

Post by krageon »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #161
dboreham wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that AWS SLA is about as much BS as the "unlimited" cell data plans we're discussing here, right? All it says is that if they fail to deliver service, with a bunch of exclusions that make it very unlikely they will ever do so, then you get to not pay for that service that you didn't get. http://aws.amazon.com/compute/sla/

That is very much more real than what you get from an ISP. If an ISP doesn't meet the advertised bandwidth, at best you get an apology. More likely you get nothing. You definitely aren't getting a refund for the service you didn't get.

> with a bunch of exclusions that make it very unlikely they will ever do so

I think the meat of their argument was that they have weaseled it in such a way that you're not getting what you expect unless you read all the fine print. Then it turns out you get basically nothing. From that point it's not a stretch to say the situation has not improved when compared to consumers: They also get nothing.

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