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Sprint Is Throttling Skype, Study Finds

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Re: Sprint Is Throttling Skype, Study Finds

#101

Post by giancarlostoro »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #99

Tip of the iceberg. Carriers see communication services as their turf, and they go to byzantine lengths to protect that. Politically it can get funny. If you work at a handset manufacturer, and sit in on sales calls, and one of your team members brings up anything remotely related to this or VOIP, you might see the carrier buyers get visibly upset and literally walk out of the room. I could never tell if they were 'a…

You know what upsets me is that I can call people on my phone and the audio quality is terrible if they're not on the same carrier (T-Mobile in the USA). I had to tell my friend to just call me on Skype the next time cause it's always a struggle to hear them clearly over the phone. I can't believe that my carrier has "HD Calling" but everyone else sounds like the calls being patched through a sewage pipe.

Re: Sprint Is Throttling Skype, Study Finds

#102

Post by beaconstudios »

viraptor wrote: post #96
konschubert wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no actual difference between those three options. The only thing that matters is that Whatsapp messenger is cheaper to use than, for example, signal messenger.

There is a difference to people who actually care a lot about how much they spend. A deal with FB may mean a local cache/interconnect and actual cheaper prices. Making other things more expensive because you're just trying to differentiate from competition is a money grab.

> Making other things more expensive because you're just trying to differentiate from competition is a money grab.

How does this make any sense? If anything, making general access more expensive is going to drive consumers to move to a different provider.

Re: Sprint Is Throttling Skype, Study Finds

#103

Post by nolok »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #82
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and I’m one of them, but it’s not against the law in US or EU.

It's highly debated in the EU, some providers have tried it but they spark a lot of debate about it.

In France it was actually the norm for cellular data, and the hellish nightmare of favoring one own service was even advertised ("with universal mobile, you get unlimited data for universal music service!!!").

We also had service tiering, such as pop/imap being priced differently than http, etc...

Free mobile then came in and used the same tactic they used on adsl, single pricing, large amount of data, no differentiation between websites / ports / data types (even including peer to peer) etc... And others had to follow.

So we're in a status quo right now, but just like our fixed line Internet, its quality depends on one of the providers not aligning with the others. If they change their mind, get bought or whatever, the game could change quickly.

Re: Sprint Is Throttling Skype, Study Finds

#104

Post by bitexploder »

metildaa wrote: post #30
bitexploder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use Zoom a lot. Haven’t noticed anything. Have Fiber if it matters.

Centurylink has mediocre peering via IPv4, but decent peering via IPv6 (which seems to be caused by peering with Hurricane Electric on IPv6 only).

CenturyLink seems to be a huge mess. They have at least 4 or 5 login pages. They seem to have acquired a bunch of smaller ISPs and not quite consolidated yet.

Re: Sprint Is Throttling Skype, Study Finds

#105

Post by viraptor »

beaconstudios wrote: post #102
viraptor wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference to people who actually care a lot about how much they spend. A deal with FB may mean a local cache/interconnect and actual cheaper prices. Making other things more expensive because you're just trying to differentiate from competition is a money grab.

> Making other things more expensive because you're just trying to differentiate from competition is a money grab. How does this make any sense? If anything, making general access more expensive is going to drive consumers to move to a different provider.

In a perfect world - yes. But phone/network providers have some weird tendency to end up being mono-/oligopolies. They like when prices are high at every provider, even without "real collusion".

For example look at roaming rates in Europe. For decades sending messages/data from another country was crazy expensive - with every single provider. Once EU ruled that roaming charges in the EU should not apply, there was no crisis or huge rise of prices to compensate the losses. Once it was forced, companies started to race each other to announce how awesome they are, being the first in the country to provide free roaming.

Re: Sprint Is Throttling Skype, Study Finds

#106

Post by Intermernet »

zuisan wrote: post #100
oarsinsync wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then how do I get the ISP to advertise my service as being free to use, the same way they do for Facebook? It's not much help that my clone is also free to use if nobody knows unless they go hunting through the fine print, as the initial assumption will be that it's a charged-for alternative.

Obviously your ISP is not going to advertise ALL social apps, that would be a huge list. As an example take this: https://www.vodafone.es/c/particulares/es/productos-y-servic... "use all your social network apps without using up your data allowance", and then they show you a list of apps, but all social apps should be zero-rated and if they are not you can report it. Same with video apps, music apps, etc. If you thin…

>The job of the market is to serve consumers

The market is created by corporations. It's job is to serve the corporations by creating the illusion it serves the consumers. That's why advertising / marketing is a thing.

Some would naively say that the market is created by the consumer, but you don't need most of what you consume, and you didn't even want a lot of what you consume until you were told it existed. (the term "you" is not necessarily referring to you personally here, but "the average consumer", on aggregate.)

Re: Sprint Is Throttling Skype, Study Finds

#107

Post by rhexs »

metildaa wrote: post #33
rhexs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had Centurylink for years (fiber and DSL) and they consistently seem to throttle most video sites. Netflix/youtube has always been hit or miss. If you ask about this on reddit or dslreports you immediately get shills claiming that they would never do that / it's impossible. Weird. Using a VPN always fixes the issue.

Have you compared IPv4 versus IPv6 performance? Centurylink seems to have much better peering via IPv6 (still a bit slow to certain destinations though), in part because they only peer with Hurricane Electric and other non-Tier 1's for IPv6.

Nope. I’ll try that out. My modem is only getting a ipv4 address right now, but maybe I can configure it.

Re: Sprint Is Throttling Skype, Study Finds

#108

Post by fyfy18 »

ishikawa wrote: post #90
qyz721 wrote: post #37

Using a SIM card on a recent trip to Mexico, where net neutrality was never a thing, was really interesting. Cell service plans come with separate tariffs for regular data and "social" data, which works only in the walled garden of Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Insta, etc., and the "social" data is much cheaper. Even though the positive reinforcement was not as draconian as stuff like this, where they're obviously tr…

Here in Brazil most carriers also offer social media data for free. On Whatsapp the exception is for voice calls. It would be great (for me, not them LOL) if they included Google Photos.

This is the same in most of Europe too. They don't explicitly charge different prices, but a lot of carriers offer something like free Instagram data or substantially discounted access to Spotify. Although they will just argue it's a marketing deal, it is in effect against net neutrality.

Re: Sprint Is Throttling Skype, Study Finds

#109

Post by wil421 »

rhexs wrote: post #20
aberoham wrote: post #17

My Zoom meetings via CenturyLink have become progressively worse since Net Neutrality bit the dust. Anyone else feel the same?

I've had Centurylink for years (fiber and DSL) and they consistently seem to throttle most video sites. Netflix/youtube has always been hit or miss. If you ask about this on reddit or dslreports you immediately get shills claiming that they would never do that / it's impossible. Weird. Using a VPN always fixes the issue.

I have AT&T fiber and experience the same thing with YouTube. If I jump on my VPN it fixes everything. It was really bad most of the year but has improved lately. Maybe it actually was a peering issue.

Re: Sprint Is Throttling Skype, Study Finds

#110

Post by Tor3 »

jackson1way wrote: post #88
Tor3 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm in Japan and want to talk with my insurance company, bank, or airline over on the other side of the world, there's just one way: A phone number. Which is the (main) reason I'm still using Skype. There are other, and sometimes better, alternatives for video/chat/group chats/photos etc. But still nothing that competes with Skype's phone support, although Skype in general has degenerated a lot since the early d…

I use Google Voice For the same reason! It‘s even better: it has a free US phone number. So my insurance could call me on that number while I‘m in Japan.

Google Voice as a service is limited to the US and Canada, so if you're a North American it's a good alternative I guess. Otherwise, not so much.
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