Verizon Wireless Reportedly Caps Netflix, YouTube Data Speeds

[tsnor]

A byte IS a byte - if I am paying for 50Mbps download speed with no data cap - give me what I pay for. If you want to limit my downloads, spell it out up front.... don't cherry pick websites. Big telecom needs to get some competition to put them in their place.

The problem is, if a big influx of their customers start fully utilizing that 50 megabit, uncapped connection for significant lengths of time, it's going to lead to network congestion. The reason they can offer that connection speed uncapped at the price they do is that the vast majority of their users only use their connection sporadically. If, however, a large portion of their users start viewing hours of 4k video every day, the network is likely to slow down for everyone. So, they are limiting performance for those kinds of usage scenarios.

The obvious alternatives would be to either increase the cost for that level of service, or keep the cost as it is, and decrease the connection speed, or reinstate data caps. There is one other option they could do though, that might still fit with "net neutrality", though it might not be much better from an end-user's perspective. They could add a sort of soft data cap, allowing up to a certain amount of data from any given internet site each day to download at full speed, and then after that amount is used up, the speeds from that site could slow down for the user until the time period refreshes. Or it could affect all sites in one large pool. So, maybe you would get 5GB of downloads each day at your full 50 megabits, after which the speed might drop to 10 megabits until the following day. All sites would be treated equally, so there would be no conflict with net neutrality, but you still might only be able to watch around a half hour of 4k video before your connection speed drops to 1080p video levels.

Once Netflix PAYS they get back to full bandwidth. Just like in 2014. That undermines all of the "they need to do this to limit bandwidth" arguments.

This has nothing to do with bandwidth, this is about monetizing control of user internet access.

Bandwidth limits are applied at the user and do not care about source "If you have used more than XXX gigabytes and we have network congestion then you are limited to YYY mb/sec". Bandwidth caps already exist. "..a big influx of their customers start fully utilizing that 50 megabit, uncapped connection for significant lengths of time, it's going to lead to network congestion...." These problems are handled with caps at the users who are using the bandwidth, not with the source of the data.

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

A byte IS a byte - if I am paying for 50Mbps download speed with no data cap - give me what I pay for. If you want to limit my downloads, spell it out up front.... don't cherry pick websites. Big telecom needs to get some competition to put them in their place.

The problem is, if a big influx of their customers start fully utilizing that 50 megabit, uncapped connection for significant lengths of time, it's going to lead to network congestion. The reason they can offer that connection speed uncapped at the price they do is that the vast majority of their users only use their connection sporadically. If, however, a large portion of their users start viewing hours of 4k video every day, the network is likely to slow down for everyone. So, they are limiting performance for those kinds of usage scenarios.

The obvious alternatives would be to either increase the cost for that level of service, or keep the cost as it is, and decrease the connection speed, or reinstate data caps. There is one other option they could do though, that might still fit with "net neutrality", though it might not be much better from an end-user's perspective. They could add a sort of soft data cap, allowing up to a certain amount of data from any given internet site each day to download at full speed, and then after that amount is used up, the speeds from that site could slow down for the user until the time period refreshes. Or it could affect all sites in one large pool. So, maybe you would get 5GB of downloads each day at your full 50 megabits, after which the speed might drop to 10 megabits until the following day. All sites would be treated equally, so there would be no conflict with net neutrality, but you still might only be able to watch around a half hour of 4k video before your connection speed drops to 1080p video levels.

I always thought the way ISP's handle data usage was completely backwards. Data caps and throttling just mean the beginning of the month is congested and slow for everyone. Then at the end of the month congestion reduces, but it will still be slow for heavy data users. If you're an ISP, wouldn't you much rather have traffic spread as evenly as possible?

To incentivize that, treat the congestion, not the total data used. By default, let everything go as fast as the network will allow. When congestion hits, throttle everyone equally. But give every user a High Priority and Low Priority mode that can only be activated during high congestion. When they activate High Priority, their traffic comes first. In Low Priority mode, they get throttled but they gain High Priority minutes. Eventually, people will start to self regulate. If they're not doing anything important they can set it to Low, and if they are, they can go to High but they'll finish faster and then get off the network.

 

[allawash]

I understand making it so each user on the tower has access to some bandwidth, but are they also capping services such as go90 and StreamPass? I highly doubt it since they own/push those services to their customers. I believe they should throttle people based on the available bandwidth on the tower, not based on the service being used. Complicated situation, they do buy the spectrum, and I'm not totally sure what things the government subsidizes for them.

 

[SteelCity1981]

yeah but is caping their data at 12mb only for HD netflix plans? if so then you 12mb speeds is perfectly fine. has anyone tried to test what would happen with a UHD netflix plan? thats my question.