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YouTube, Netflix Videos Found to Be Slowed by Wireless Carriers
The largest U.S. telecom companies are slowing internet traffic to and from popular apps like YouTube and Netflix, according to new research from Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The researchers used a smartphone app called Wehe, downloaded by about 100,000 consumers, to monitor which mobile services are being throttled when and by whom, in what likely is the single largest running study of its kind.
Among U.S. wireless carriers, YouTube is the No. 1 target of throttling, where data speeds are slowed, according to the data. Netflix Inc.'s video streaming service, Amazon.com Inc.'s Prime Video and the NBC Sports app have been degraded in similar ways, according to David Choffnes, one of the study's authors who developed the Wehe app.
From January through early May, the app detected "differentiation" by Verizon Communications Inc. more than 11,100 times, according to the study. This is when a type of traffic on a network is treated differently than other types of traffic. Most of this activity is throttling. AT&T Inc. did this 8,398 times and it was spotted almost 3,900 times on the network of T-Mobile US Inc. and 339 times on Sprint Corp.'s network, the study found. The numbers are partly influenced by the size of the networks and user bases. C Spire, a smaller privately held wireless operator, had the fewest instances of differentiation among U.S. providers, while Verizon had the most.
Also at Marketing Land.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:20PM (2 children)
Look at the real rates:
https://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/country/us/ [netflix.com]
They're in the ballpark of 3-4 Mbps on average. Amazon and Netflix advise a 15 and 25 Mbps connection respectively for 4K streaming.
How do we interpret these numbers? If tens of millions of people are using 4 Mbps at the same time, the ISPs can't handle it? Apparently, the world's total average Internet traffic currently amounts to about 62 terabytes per second. That's consistent with these sources:
https://www.livescience.com/54094-how-big-is-the-internet.html [livescience.com] (Cisco says 2 zettabytes per year by 2019, which is 63.38 TB per second)
http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/ [internetlivestats.com] (says 61.68 TB per second right now)
10 million people streaming at 4 Mbps is 5 terabytes per second, already about 8% of the total Internet traffic. Bump up the number of people or bump up the stream quality, and suddenly Internet traffic has exploded.
You've got people out there with gigabit connections, but if just 100 million people were equally sharing the total Internet traffic of 62 TB/s, that would come out to 4.96 Mbps per person. Around 3-4 billion people use the Internet globally [wikipedia.org].
Cisco forecasts 3.3 zettabytes per year by 2021 [cisco.com]. Maybe we'll see it hit 100 ZB or 1 yottabyte per year eventually, if not more. Gotta have that 32K resolution [soylentnews.org] @ 240 Hz VR video experience (live).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday September 14 2018, @12:22AM (1 child)
You missed the elephant in the room in your rush to sperg about numbers. MOBILE DATA. The fact you even mentioned 4K video streams shows you clearly missed that point.
They are throttling MOBILE DATA and that is a good thing. They can't build new capacity fast enough to keep up with demand so throttling the morons watching hour after hour of video on a phone makes perfect sense as a way to allocate a scarce resource fairly.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @01:47AM
Wait. They're building new capacity? Won't that cut into profits?