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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: 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.