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posted by takyon on Thursday September 13 2018, @10:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the wireless-tubes dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @12:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @12:29AM (#734584)

    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

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