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T-Mobile Throttles All Video Streams and Downloads to 1.5Mbps, EFF Says

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday January 06 2016, @05:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the t-1-speeds dept.

chromas writes:

From the Ars-ticle:

T-Mobile USA's controversial "Binge On" program is throttling all HTML5 video streams and direct video downloads to about 1.5Mbps, according to tests run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Binge On, unveiled in November, is enabled by default for all T-Mobile customers and downgrades video resolution to 480p in order to reduce data usage. Companies that cooperate with T-Mobile can stream video without counting against customers' high-speed data limits. That means you can watch Netflix, HBO, Hulu, and about another 20 services without using up your data.

But all video is downgraded, regardless of whether it gets a data cap exemption, which has led to a rift between T-Mobile and Google's YouTube.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2016, @06:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2016, @06:40AM (#285513)

    YouTube supports HTTPS. I guess you need to enable it if you want to save more than DVD quality.

    Ironically, doing that would prevent tmobile from caching popular videos. I guess at the same time, they would not be exempted from your data-cap.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Wednesday January 06 2016, @06:53AM

    by Whoever (4524) on Wednesday January 06 2016, @06:53AM (#285514) Journal

    YouTube supports HTTPS. I guess you need to enable it if you want to save more than DVD quality.

    Ironically, doing that would prevent tmobile from caching popular videos. I guess at the same time, they would not be exempted from your data-cap.

    Such ignorance. Youtube is https by default. Youtube is not part of the "binge-on" program, so Youtube bandwidth always counted against your data cap. However, https streams from youtube are throttled by T-Mobile.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2016, @06:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2016, @06:57AM (#285518)

    One of the Ars comments addresses this:

    As I explained in a previous comment, it means T-Mobile is slowing the connection down/throttling so you do not have enough bandwidth to get a stream that is better than 480p. So even if you have the capability of 20Mbs, T-Mobile is slowing connections to certain servers down to 1500Kbps (or whatever) so the only option you have is the 480p stream.

    Remember, all streaming video services available for iOS are required to support adaptive bitrate streaming [wikipedia.org] so videos can be watched/streamed regardless of connection type. While this is an iOS requirement, it has made it into the video services on other platforms (it's just easier to implement that way).

    T-Mobile is taking advantage of this when they throttle connections to known video services. Even if the service is encrypted, services typically use specific domains to serve video from. Those domains are not encrypted and are relatively easy to target.

    Rosyna
    Ars Praefectus
    reply 14 days ago