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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

#171

Post by crazygringo »

gruez wrote: post #108
crazygringo wrote: post #57

For both wired and wireless, it's time for legislation to address exactly what it and isn't permitted with regard to advertised speeds, throttling, and total usage -- both with respect to users, and with respect to peering. It's not just an issue of policy, but one of transparency too. It's a fact of life that more people will want to consume data than a network can support. So where are we going to make the cut? Dim…

>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…

> but the whole country has good access to all the major carriers

That's why I said switching can be expensive. If you discover bad internet speeds a month after you signed a standard 2-year contract with a carrier, what are you going to do?

Even if you pay that, you may need to pay for a new phone because of incompatible networks.

Not to mention the PITA of transferring your number.

(Similarly even if you have multiple ISP's, you may need to pay $$ for installation, a new modem, etc.)

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

#173

Post by toast0 »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #160
toast0 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> In part, because if the throttle all bulk data transfers over some minimum size, all the time, most people are only going to notice on video streaming, since videos are the most frequent bulk transfers. >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…

> I was unclear. I'm suggesting that carriers are in fact, throttling all bulk data, but reporting is focused on video. 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 use…

> 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".

Adding capacity is easy to say, but can be hard to do. Where I live, the city council basically won't permit new towers; whatever licensed spectrum on the towers we have is the capacity.

Trying to frame this as a contractual issue is a losing battle. Nowhere ever did someone contractually promise you a meaningful speed to an unknown destination at a consumer approachable price. Certainly, it's not transparent, and that's reason to be upset.

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

#174

Post by alyandon »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #111
alyandon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in my area Spectrum/TWC service has 400 mbps down and 20 mbps up. Still not great but far better than the old days.

It's probably 20mbps shared between the whole neighborhood with high latency. At this point, we should have symmetric fiber with at sub 50ms latency and 100mbps down and up everywhere like we work to have water, sewage, electricity, and gas. Right now, all of our money goes towards maintaining an antiquated system for providing commercial laden garbage media.

A 20mbps shared limit for an entire neighborhood for a major cableco might have been the case 20 years ago when cable internet deployment was in its infancy.

While I agree that symmetric fiber would be better, my speeds are always consistently close to what I'm paying for and I'm one of those types of people that:

  1) utilizes my upstream because of things like DR backups
  2) treats cabelco with suspicion and thus records speeds, latency, packet loss stats continously
  3) will pick up the phone and complain when I see problems until they are resolved to my satisfaction
For example, this is representative of what I typically see: https://pastebin.com/wSt8fdee

I count myself as one of the lucky ones and YMMV.

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

#175

Post by milankragujevic »

milankragujevic wrote: post #119
dmitrygr wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DSL is a joke. What are you going to do with 5 Mbps down in the modern world or 30MB+ websites?

DSL (VDSL2) can and does go over 100 Mbps.

Downvoter... Care to elaborate? VDSL2 does very often get speeds of over 100 Mbps. It is a fact and a well known one.

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

#176

Post by kwhitefoot »

cryptoz wrote: post #21
kwhitefoot wrote: post #6

The title should say "US Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study" The article doesn't suggest that this problem exists outside the US. Perhaps it does.

The second sentence of the article links to the paper cited, which shows the international data.

Ah, thanks.

A cursory scan of the paper found table 4 which suggests that the problem is principally a North American one nonetheless.

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