Stanford Study: T-Mobile's 'Binge On' Program Violates Net Neutrality

[Lucian Armasu]

Stanford researchers released a study that says T-Mobile's "Binge On" program violates net neutrality and is "likely illegal."

Stanford Study: T-Mobile's 'Binge On' Program Violates Net Neutrality : Read more

 

[Gam3r01]

This is a fairly interesting topic.
I personally think the low quality streaming off all services would be the most accepted response. Choosing what goes on data and what dosent (IE podcasts vs high quality videos). Raising current plans data limits means nothing, it has nothing to do with the net neutrality issue at hand.

 

[falchard]

I think the best response would be to say FUCK net neutrality. If you don't like the fact T-Mobile doesn't count data towards the main streaming services, then use another carrier. Get capped on data out of indignation. It's not like T-Mobiles getting kick backs. It would be worse if they parsed every packet to see if it's a video.

 

[jaber2]

T-Mobile customer here, not happy with what I hear, I am switching

 

[gangrel]

One thing of note...this does seem to be a VERY clear violation of net neutrality...but T-Mobile trotted it out anyway. One *has* to think their lawyers warned them it would, at the very least, get challenged, and probably tossed. They did it anyway.

I think the push over the last several years, by all the carriers, to draw subscribers by pushing more, and more, and MORE data all the time, might be coming home to roost. They may have created an unsustainable pricing structure, or overly high customer expectations. See, I'm not sure that lowering the speed on video is necessarily the solution, or at least not all of it. I know that my electric bill has a fixed cost per month, plus at least 2 rate levels...the first X kWh is at the base price, and anything over that is substantially higer...like, 50 or 100% more. (Been a LONG time since I looked at my electric bill. ) This is the kind of pricing that would make sense...2, perhaps even 3 tiers.

I will concede that any proposal along these lines is going to meet with banshee-like screams.

 

[Emanuel Elmo]

I bet what happened is that AT&T and Verizon got together and went to Stanford and paid of some people just so Stanford can release a study that says T-Mobile is violating net-neutrality. Why? cause they are pissed from loosing all those customer for there over priced networks.

 

[BulkZerker]

T-Mobile must have drawn the short straw on this one. The other telcos are surely watching the results of the outcome with baited breath to see what they ( telecoms ) can get away with.

 

[alextheblue]

The ultimate irony? Netflix was one of the big pushers of Net Neutrality, and did so under false pretenses (the ISPs are discriminating against us! wait turns out our own backbone provider was capping us, not the ISPs OOPS too late!).

This one of the downsides of net neutrality. Nobody wanted to see it as anything but a "fix" for... something. Some grave, uh... injustice? Yeah, yeah, that's it. You can't even implement positive things like "Netflix streaming doesn't count against your data limit!" because oh no, that's not fair to companies that don't participate in the Binge On program. So those who would have enjoyed the Binge On program will be screwed out of it, and not by T-Mo, but by the meddling FCC. God forbid someone want to give unlimited Netflix streaming to their customers on their network.

Another big downside: Once gaming (and other real-time) packets leave your premises, they can no longer be given priority via QoS. That would be packet discrimination, and it's illegal for ISPs to discriminate against packets. So your real-time traffic is given the exact same treatment as non-real-time traffic (emails, buffered streams, torrents, etc). No more optimization by prioritizing one packet type over another. All traffic equal, no matter how stupid a policy that actually is.

 

[hevix]

I bet what happened is that AT&T and Verizon got together and went to Stanford and paid of some people just so Stanford can release a study that says T-Mobile is violating net-neutrality. Why? cause they are pissed from loosing all those customer for there over priced networks.

Seems like they're right regardless.. how do we actually KNOW that TMO isn't getting kickbacks? This is not good for them to chose who the preferred vendor is..

 

[NeilBlake]

This entire debate has those claiming this is a net neutrality violation sound like elitists.

No one is picking winners and losers. ANY service can sign up and there is no fee to do so.

This also doesn't hurt competitors not on it. In fact, those saying this hurts "small startups" are very wrong. Let's be realistic here. If all data is on cap, people are going to be using Hulu, Netflix, WatchESPN, etc. Now, with BingeOn, those who use the service will have data to use to watch things they otherwise wouldn't. If I owned a streaming company this would not bother me in the least.

 

[NeilBlake]

[quotemsg=17417294,0,5190]The ultimate irony? Netflix was one of the big pushers of Net Neutrality, and did so under false pretenses (the ISPs are discriminating against us! wait turns out our own backbone provider was capping us, not the ISPs OOPS too late!).

This one of the downsides of net neutrality. Nobody wanted to see it as anything but a "fix" for... something. Some grave, uh... injustice? Yeah, yeah, that's it. You can't even implement positive things like "Netflix streaming doesn't count against your data limit!" because oh no, that's not fair to companies that don't participate in the Binge On program. So those who would have enjoyed the Binge On program will be screwed out of it, and not by T-Mo, but by the meddling FCC. God forbid someone want to give unlimited Netflix streaming to their customers on their network.

Another big downside: Once gaming (and other real-time) packets leave your premises, they can no longer be given priority via QoS. That would be packet discrimination, and it's illegal for ISPs to discriminate against packets. So your real-time traffic is given the exact same treatment as non-real-time traffic (emails, buffered streams, torrents, etc). No more optimization by prioritizing one packet type over another. All traffic equal, no matter how stupid a policy that actually is.[/quotemsg]

Your last paragraph really hits the nail on the head. I ask people who try to use net neutrality as a way to hurt consumers if they use QoS on their home router. Almost all of them always answer yes. I tell them to turn it off as it makes them hypocrites. If they get frame buffering watching a movie or lag on a video game, tough, that's what they wanted.

 

[doc2480]

T-mobile customer here, I took advantage of an unlimited data plan they had going for about two months last year for family plans. I could care less about their Binge on Demand service as I don't care how much data I use since I have no cap. To give an example I was away for two weeks last July and I used over 65 gigs of data for video. wasn't charged a dime. This is really a marketing ploy to get customers. The other carriers are waiting to see if this will get canned by the FCC before they implement something like it.

 

[bwohl]

Signed the family up over X-Mas for the 4 lines w/ 6GB each for $120. I have to admit I came for the data amount and price per line. Then found out about Binge On. I was not happy. We cancelled Netflix and use Amazon Prime since last June. They are picking winners and losers...

 

[Everdark81]

Net neutrality was put in place to prevent companies like Comcast from CHARGING companies like Netflix for priority bandwith or zero-rating. T-Mobile is not charging anyone for anything, and provides the damn tools to become part of the program. If the goal of the FCC is to promote CONSUMER FRIENDLY products and services, then Binge-On is a shining example they should be praising. If YouTube doesn't want to use the tools available and become part of the program, that's Google's problem, not T-Mobile. If CONSUMERS choose to move to another service because YouTube doesn't want to use those tools, that's called CONSUMER CHOICE, not ISP CONTROL.

 

[stevenrix]

In their unlimited data plan, T-Mobile starts throttling your connection around 17 gigs.
As a moderate user it's very easy to reach this threshold in 1 month.

 

[jeremy2020]

It should be noted that t-mobile is not "optimizing" video. They're simply throttling the connection when they detect there is a video being played. It's also throttling all video whether it's part of the binge-on program or not. The companies that join the binge-on program simply have their video data not counted against the end user's data cap.