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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: 4, Interesting) by lentilla on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:53PM (8 children)
I'm not sure I understand why an ISP would want to throttle streaming content. Here's my logic:
If I were writing a streaming video player, this would be my strategy:
From the ISPs perspective, let's say lots of people want to watch cat videos. Assuming they don't mess with the stream, my player might be "downloading" (at full speed) for 10% of the time. Now let's assume the ISP does mess with the stream - now my player is downloading 80% of the time. But here's the important part: the total amount of data transferred will be the same no matter which scenario is chosen. When you aggregate the load over many customers watching cat videos your total terabits (or whatever) per second remains the same. The functional difference is that if you choose to throttle the stream: 1) videos take longer to start playing, 2) it takes longer to resume when you (say) skip ahead, and 3) you run a greater risk of having your buffer empty.
So now my question would be: why would an ISP risk upsetting their paying customers when it gains them so little? Spite?
Of course, I might be mistaken how streaming media players work - that's a real possibility. That being said, if I were Netflix et al (and I assume these guys have their own players) I would be writing my media player both to give my customers an excellent experience whilst making sure I don't hammer my server.
Any thoughts?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday September 14 2018, @12:06AM
I suppose users with square eyes that aren't working will be watching the videos all day long, at which point having to wait a minute or two on each video due to buffering will probably actually reduce the total number of videos they get to watch.
That said, it's obviously much more about crippling people's service so they have to buy an "upgrade" than any bandwidth saving for the ISP -- otherwise what's the point in just picking on video traffic? In some ways, because a video is nice to watch as a continuous, uninterrupted stream, and because it is a big amount of data, it's much more annoying for that to be slowed up than, say, loading a web page to read. Hey, if the ISP really just wanted to save on bandwidth without annoying the customer, they could just throttle ad traffic! That would only annoy customers that use websites that won't load content until the ads have finished loading.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @12:13AM (2 children)
First, if you throttle it enough, Netflix/Youtube/etc. will step down to the next lower resolution (and bitrate) stream, so the total amount transferred is not necessarily the same.
Second, the idea here is that if you make Netflix's user experience worse, Netflix will have to pay you money to put it back how it was.
Most ISP customers, if they do get upset, will blame Netflix rather than their ISP. The ISP gets blamed when things don't work, or when everything on the web is slow; even relatively knowledgable users are likely to see "Netflix is stuttering/reducing resolution, but webpages/FTP/etc. are all behaving normal" as indicating a problem on Netflix's end rather than assuming their ISP is abusing them to extort Netflix.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday September 14 2018, @01:20AM (1 child)
Are people still that clueless about tech these days? Surely you don't have to know much to know that slow internet service is bad for video? Even if they've grown up in a city center with always fast internet at home, they must have seen the effect on their mobiles. I know there will always be some with no clue, but most?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @01:39AM
(1) Knowing that slow internet is bad for video isn't the same thing as expecting your ISP to be slowing down ONLY video. If netflix sucks, but nothing else on the internet seems slow, why would you assume it's an ISP issue? There's a certain level of wisdom/cynicism required to jump to the idea "What if someone's deliberately and selectively fucking us over?"
(2) And yes, they are that clueless. Sadly, having grown up around networked computers doesn't impart knowledge by osmosis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @12:20AM (2 children)
Why would they care? In most areas there's at most 2 choices of ISP and chances are that both of them are going to engage in this kind of rent seeking behavior before too long. At which point, there's not really anything that the customer can do as they're unlikely to move just because of terrible internet.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Friday September 14 2018, @01:58AM (1 child)
Such learned helplessness!
Tell you what we can do. Municipal broadband, that's what. If the telco monopolies get too greedy, there will be a backlash.
And know what else is fun about throttling legit services? Yarrr, me hearties, piracy be looking popular again! Torrents ahoy! alt.binaries ho! I'd love to see the MAFIAA sue the telcos for, what's the legal term? Contributory infringement, yes.
And, you know, there's still the library. These days, most public libraries do have movie collections available for borrowing.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday September 18 2018, @06:23AM
>Municipal broadband, that's what.
ISPs have made that illegal through exclusive contracts or lobbying.
>These days, most public libraries do have movie collections available for borrowing.
Not for long, I suspect. Libraries used to have a lot of freedom in preserving digital media, but some people don't like that very much. Nintendo is a recent example.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @12:29AM
I think you are assuming that there is no drop in video quality. These streaming services will scale back the quality in an attempt to maintain continuity of the playback, so less data can be transmitted, and video is not a guaranteed QoS so, many times frames are dropped, reducing things even more