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AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

adriano.fyi

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Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#21
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy. goto here: https://www.att.com/support log in. cancel. tell them why. goto https://www.t-mobile.com port your number and sign up. and you're done! You can't legislate good behavior. You can only hit them in the checkbook. Wireless fortunately doesn't have the cable providers do, where local governments have entrenched players into local monopolies. Switching away is the most powerful thing you can do.

I’d be happy to switch to T Mobile if they could stop leaking their customers data.

ok, fair point.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#22

While everyone knows that all wireless carriers are universally terrible, I've actually had a fairly noneventful (read: good) experience with T-Mobile over the last decade. I've never observed evidence of traffic shaping or any other shady business (like capturing NXDOMAIN DNS responses and directing you to a sponsored search page). I've also never observed significant performance degradation from congestion-based pr…

Yeah, except they leak customer data regularly and have offshored tons of customer service to India -- including onboarding. When I tried to sign up, they didn't know what an esim was and wanted my SSN, along with other data that could easily be used to steal my identity. I don't want to spend my days arguing with people, definitely not about the existence of esim; but I did that day. It went all the way up their customer service management chain.

T-Mobile is also completely hit or miss with service. If you are in a location where it works, fine. Good luck if you travel.

If you can tolerate T-Mobile, Google Fi is better in almost every way security wise -- and I am very anti-google services these days. It uses the T-Mobile network.

As for me? ATT has provided the best service of any carrier while traveling, so I will use them. When I need security, I flip on my VPN.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#23
This might, in a very "take it with a pinch of salt" way, be actually good for stirring up the incentives of lazy web devs (read: greedy bosses who don't care about technical prowess) to make slimmer websites... if enough people in the developed world have issues accessing them, it might at last have the effect that couldn't be achieved by probably orders of magnitude more people having worse issues from developing countries.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#24
Ditto, same in a rural area of Wisconsin I'm at a lot, for the past 3 years or so. Like, 3/4 of the Internet is slow through their shaping garbage. What worked for me was using WireGuard to my home network in an urban area (1 gig symmetrical fiber), or, using an ssh ~ socks proxy. Problems no more, until they decide to block those.

Support has been awful, best of luck if you go that route. They took us off their unlimited plan without consent, took 6 months to get it back. Also, throttling doesn't actually seem to happen once over their limit on the advertised unlimited* data plan, it's just most of the Internet is awfully slow most of the time going directly through this, ah, ISP, which they claim to be.

* Not actually an unlimited plan

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#25
> This is an “unlimited” 100Mbit plan with 50GB for Business Fast Track (prioritized) data. Being that I was far below the 50GB of monthly Fast Track data, my data should have had top priority, so I became suspicious.

And yet ATT will get away with this fraud or theft of selling something it is not delivering because no one in government wants to hold them accountable.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#26
post #23

This might, in a very "take it with a pinch of salt" way, be actually good for stirring up the incentives of lazy web devs (read: greedy bosses who don't care about technical prowess) to make slimmer websites... if enough people in the developed world have issues accessing them, it might at last have the effect that couldn't be achieved by probably orders of magnitude more people having worse issues from developing c…

>(read: greedy bosses who don't care about technical prowess)

Oh come on. There's plenty of ICs out there who'll happily do slapdash work because nobody cares if you close tickets well as long as you close them good enough. So what if the fix only lasts 2yr before needing to be refactored for performance. Lord knows if the code will even be in use then.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#27

> Why AT&T wants bandwidth to appear lower than reality is a mystery to me, but I digress For you a speed test is just once in a life time event. For a wireless provider this is a thing what clogs the shared media of a radio channel for quite a lot (modern speed tests try to push 100 or even more M Bytes ?) and cause a disruption for everyone else on the same channel. I don't know why ATT throttles (if at all, not a…

fast.com was created by Netflix to show if your ISP was throttling Netflix traffic.

A lot of mobile services (at least in the US) offer "unlimited streaming" which is really just bandwidth-limited to offer SD-quality streams and offer "HD" (read: less-limited) streaming as a paid add-on.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#28
Get Calyx. Unlimited data, no throttling service via T-Mobile. Grandfathered contract from Clearwire

https://members.calyxinstitute.org/enroll/membership

I've done nearly gigabit symmetrical over 5G with it before and several Terabytes in a month. No issues.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#29
post #23

This might, in a very "take it with a pinch of salt" way, be actually good for stirring up the incentives of lazy web devs (read: greedy bosses who don't care about technical prowess) to make slimmer websites... if enough people in the developed world have issues accessing them, it might at last have the effect that couldn't be achieved by probably orders of magnitude more people having worse issues from developing c…

>(read: greedy bosses who don't care about technical prowess) Oh come on. There's plenty of ICs out there who'll happily do slapdash work because nobody cares if you close tickets well as long as you close them good enough. So what if the fix only lasts 2yr before needing to be refactored for performance. Lord knows if the code will even be in use then.

Yeah... I was just anticipating the opposite kind of responses: "we web debs would like to make things right but our bosses don't care and expect it to be made fast even if fat"
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