121–130 of 163 posts
Not that it's Skype's fault they're getting throttled, but I wish I had an alternative to Skype. I haven't found a service that lets me dial worldwide (particularly USA/Canada) at anywhere near the rates Skype offers.
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.
The carriers in their inability to cooperate to improve call quality is pushing their customers to the alternatives they fear most.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it actually different tariffs or do they offer free “social” data? If they do offer it, that’s not against net neutrality unless they throttle other traffic.
I think zero rating is considered a violation of net neutrality by most people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating
Take the plan I'm on with T-Mobile. I pay a fixed monthly amount and get 3 GB of data per month. If I go over 3 GB, T-Mobile reserves the right to give me lower speed for the rest of the month.
T-Mobile has a thing called "Music Freedom". Under Music Freedom, they zero rate around 45 streaming services.
Look at this from my point of view as a consumer. I signed up for 3 GB of full speed data a month, and I get that. There is never a situation due to Music Freedom's zero rating where I find myself short on data and think "dammit...I could have downloaded this if it weren't for that zero rating!".
All that Music Freedom does from my consumer standpoint is make it so sometimes I get more than the 3 GB my plan entitles me to.
Compare this to throttling and blocking. With throttling and blocking if T-Mobile were, say, throttling Skype or blocking it, then I could find myself saying "dammit...I paid for this and they are not giving it to me!".
In the Music Freedom case, they give me all I paid for and they toss some free extra on top. In blocking/throttling, they interfere with me using what I paid for. From a consumer point of view equating these two as net neutrality advocates do just seems odd on the face of it.
If we keep net neutrality focused just on making sure that we get the data we pay for, free of blocking and throttling, and if the ISP wants to give people extras on top of that let them, and I think net neutrality would then have near universal strong support among consumers, maybe even sufficient to get laws through Congress.
But what about the actual potential harms to competition from zero rating, which is one of the main points brought up in favor of covering it under net neutrality?
We can deal with that without shoving it into net neutrality. We already have a whole legal framework and associated regulatory infrastructure in place to deal with that: antitrust. We can use that to distinguish between the kind of zero rating this is probably good for consumers (Music Freedom) and the kind that is not (ISP zero rating just their own streaming service).
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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…
We saw it before and it wasn’t good. In short the carriers had control and companies that wanted access to consumers had to strike deals with the carrier, those deals as a result were very generous to the carrier (eg. they took 50% of revenue).
This is not good for the consumer over the long term.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am the consumer and I hate this bullshit.
Either you use the services that much and you pay 3€ or you don't and they get taken more simply out of your data plan. You pay more for unlimited use. If you don't need it, you pay less. I like it, I don't want additional social media services, I get to pay less.
I'm curious on what the pricing differences are.
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.
One app is saying this is occurring without anyone being able to duplicate the claim in a lab. Bloomberg could do better by getting a second source.
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…
Is your anecdote over a decade old? That may have happened to a much weaker extent before IMS[1] carrier deployments became widespread, and before the consolidation of the Android and iOS platforms. Not to say that VoIP apps like Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, WeChat Voice, KaoKao, etc. plug into carrier IMS cores, but carriers definitely did see the writing on the wall and prepared for the cannabilization of their voice revenue for quite some time.
Note that Apple devices enabled voice-over-LTE as part of their iOS 8 rollout on iPhone 6's or higher[2], and Google recently figured out how to do the same for some Project Fi phones back in Feburary 2017[3].
The last remnant of strong wireless VoIP app vs. wireless voice differentiation practices is mainly the Middle East, but I believe handset manufacturers around the world generally do not experience such vehement (or even any) pushback from carriers these days.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multimedia_Subsystem
[2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203078
[3] https://9to5google.com/2017/02/17/google-mvno-project-fi-vol...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think zero rating is considered a violation of net neutrality by most people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating
I think that this is one of the main reasons that it is harder than it should be to convince average people in the US, especially on the political right, that we need net neutrality. Take the plan I'm on with T-Mobile. I pay a fixed monthly amount and get 3 GB of data per month. If I go over 3 GB, T-Mobile reserves the right to give me lower speed for the rest of the month. T-Mobile has a thing called "Music Freedom"…
If I didn't get included in your zero rated list of services, or put forth the effort to conform to your amp-like provider-specific rules, then I am blocked or throttled or charged more for or whatever.
Pipes picking and choosing winners should be a no compromise situation. But you have to tackle the lack of alternative ISPs before you can get there (and you then probably will get there even without legislation).
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.