

T-Mobile: streaming music no longer counts against data cap - sahaskatta
http://www.t-mobile.com/musicfreedom

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throwaway_yy2Di
This is a major breach of net neutrality. T-Mobile wants to give customers
free bandwidth to one type of service, while charging for bandwidth going
eleswhere. The network costs are identical: it's not the place of a neutral
ISP to discriminate on the contents of the bytes!

(edit to correct error -- it's _not_ restricted to T-Mobile's own music
service. Mea culpa)

(full disclosure: I'm a T-Mobile customer)

~~~
Igglyboo
Until t-mobile says that other services will cost more, I see no problem with
letting music be free.

~~~
sroerick
Try building a small indie label web streaming music startup.

And asking your customers to pay more because you don't have a T-Mobile
partnership.

"Letting music be free", as long as it participates in a corporate subsidy, no
thanks.

~~~
chez17
I honestly don't understand your position. This was data that was being
charged for before, now as a service to their customers they aren't charging
for it. This is an attempt to gain more customers, it's not charging extra for
other services, you have everything you had before, now if you choose to use
these services you don't get the data billed to your account. It's not
charging more for a fast lane, it's giving something away for advertising
purposes. I am a web developer, net neutrality is very important to me, I just
don't see how this is a major offense to that. Can you explain your position
some more?

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politician
This position seeks to establish the concept that bits have a color, and that
different colors have different costs. The tactic is to create market
segmentation out of whole cloth. The next step is to report data usage as
different buckets -- "Web Site-colored bits", "Popular Web Site-colored bits",
"Music-colored bits", and "Video-colored bits". Eventually, they _will_ charge
different rates for different colors of bits.

Now, today, yeah, sure, it looks like a Too Good To Be True giveaway. My
advice? Look twice.

~~~
gergles
They already color bits; tethering bits cost more than non-tethering bits.

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bobbles
It's funny that in Australia the carriers realised that offering free data on
facebook, twitter etc would increase the number of people that would move to
the service, and from my POV seemed like a good deal for all involved.

The state of the US carrier system has messed itself up so badly that a
carrier trying to offer something for FREE is now being attacked by the
customers it's trying to serve.

What a joke

~~~
cstrat
The people sharing concerns with what T-Mobile are doing aren't looking at it
through a short sighted consumer lens.

It's a great move for consumers right now who stream music. However it is
encouraging a tighter coupling between content producers and service providers
- which dismantles the neutrality of the Internet. In the long run, consumers
are said to loose out because only the biggest businesses will be able to
afford to maintain their tight coupling. Smaller players will lose out.

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tzs
I'm not sure there is a net neutrality issue here. Let me pose a hypothetical
to try to bring into focus what I'm having trouble understanding.

HYPOTHETICAL:

You have internet through an ISP that charges for data. I am a provider of
paid content (movies, music, ebooks...whatever) and you are a customer of
mine. Your ISP provides detailed billing that breaks down your bill by IP
address.

I allow you to send me a copy of your ISP bill each month, and I figure out
from the detail billing break down how much of your data costs were due to
downloading or streaming content you purchased from me. I reimburse you for
that.

QUESTIONS:

1\. Is there a net neutrality violation here?

2\. If you say that there is, can anything be done to stop it?

3\. If there is NOT a violation of net neutrality here...does that change if
the ISP makes it easier for me to pay part of your bill? For instance, suppose
the ISP offers to save me the hassle of getting and reading a copy of your
bill and instead they track your usage of my data and they bill me, and deduct
those costs from you bill?

(The situation in #3 is essentially, I believe, what AT&T called "Sponsored
Data", and was pretty widely frowned upon by net neutrality advocates).

4\. If you say that the original hypothetical was OK, but the ISP getting
involved as described in question 3 is not, what is it about ISP involvement
that makes a difference? I am assuming that the ISP offers the "pay for your
customers' data" service to anyone, for any kind of data.

~~~
arg01
It's one of those nebulous things. For example.

Is it illegal for me to pay you a commission to sell products for me?

Is it illegal for you to subcontract selling these products?

Is it illegal for the subcontractors to subcontract?

Is it illegal for me to give a signing bonus if you recruit your friends to
work for me?

Is it illegal for you to get a bonus based on your direct and indirect
contribution to how well the company is doing?

Of course none of these are illegal on their face but if you add them all up
into a pyramid scheme you can bet that it's objectionable to many and that in
many countries it's illegal.

It's a shade of gray. Many people here believe that the importance of keeping
the net neutral is huge (even while giving a wink and a nod to QOS and other
realistic compromises). You can even tell by the mixed reactions throughout
the comment thread that people believe this to be a very slippery slope, they
want this but are worried about even precedents like this one. As your comment
highlighted net neutrality can be nebulous so when you push a boundry it is
quite possible that there is very little to stop you continuing to push.

Having said that I don't necessarily disagree with your reasoning, it's one of
the reasons I support Aero being legal. Possibly a little hypocritically.

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jack-r-abbit
I'm not sure why everyone is freaking out about this. Remember when you got so
many minutes of talk time a month? Now we get unlimited talk. Remember when
you had to pay for texts? Now we all get unlimited texts. Remember when
streaming music ate your data limit? Now we all get unlimited music streaming.
Not sure what the issue is.

~~~
jmgrosen
If it were unlimited music streaming, that'd be pretty much fine. However,
it's not -- it's free music stream for _a particular six services_.

~~~
jlebar
> If it were unlimited music streaming, that'd be pretty much fine.

To be fair, it's unclear how you'd actually implement this.

Would you suggest a special bit on the TCP packet saying "this is for music
streaming" (cf RFC 3514)?

Or, more seriously, would T-Mobile have some form where anybody could enter a
Bro filter to identify traffic coming from "their" "music streaming" service?
Setting aside the fact that writing and running an arbitrary number of
arbitrarily-complex DPI filters is hard, how would T-Mobile filter out people
abusing the system ("my music streaming service also lets you stream one of
ten songs, or you can torrent; the traffic is designed to be
indistinguishable") without appearing to be biased towards big incumbents?

~~~
Touche
You don't implement it, as it is unethical.

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LeoPanthera
Unless you use Rdio. And then it still does.

~~~
sahaskatta
They are taking a vote to add other services to the data-free list. They have
just about every major one listed including Amazon Music, Beats, TuneIn,
SoundCloud, and Xbox Music. Google Music is currently taking a huge lead over
the others.

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mwsherman
We should consider the possibility that non-neutral arrangements will take the
form of discounts, not price increases.

This is analogous to the fact that Amazon, WalMart et al can negotiate better
shipping rates with Fedex, USPS et al, and can in turn offer free or cheap
shipping to the end user.

This is also cheap for T-Mobile. Streaming music is not a zero impact on
bandwidth, but (say) a 256K stream is small on (say) a 5mb/s connection. And
like most consumer bandwidth, it assumes that most people won’t use it, most
of the time.

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Touche
How do they know the customer is listening to music? Deep packet inspection?

~~~
glifchits
Probably just by checking if the origin of certain requests is a server
belonging to one of their partner sites?

~~~
Touche
Partner sites serve more than just music bits.

~~~
glifchits
Yeah, but it doesn't make sense that T-Mobile would charge you for the album
art or the banner ad and not the music file.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Seems like they think it makes sense to do that. From the fine print at the
bottom of the page:

> _Licensed music streaming from included services does not count toward
> Simple Choice high speed data allotment on T-Mobile’s network; song
> downloads, video content, and non-audio content excluded._

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mikeash
Looking into this a little, I don't understand it _at all_.

The plans already include unlimited data. They say "no overages. Ever."

They do have one limit, which is 1GB on LTE (per month, I assume). After that,
your speeds are reduced to 3G.

What makes this hard to understand is that 3G is _perfectly_ adequate for
music streaming. You really only need about 100kbps to stream high-quality
music, and even half-assed 3G is adequate for that. Hell, I've managed to
stream music over EDGE before, with the only problem being the injection of
lots of annoying GSM buzz into my stereo system.

So I guess what it comes down to is, they're making it so that a certain class
of slow-and-steady LTE usage, which doesn't need anything close to LTE speeds,
will no longer affect your ability to get LTE speeds when you actually need
it. Or something like that. Which is nice, but nowhere near the big deal they
make it out to be.

~~~
akerl_
It's a huge deal. I use iTunes Radio and similar when I'm driving to listen to
music. I get 5GB per month of LTE-speed, after which they crank me down to
sad-town speeds.

Previously, on months where I drove more often, I hit the cap. This means I'll
not have to care about keeping an eye on my usage.

You're correct about the actual change they made: letting me do something
that's comparatively low-bandwidth without it counting against my high-
bandwidth concerns. But for me at least, you've underestimated the benefit:
I'm unlikely to need to look at my usage again or do math to decide if it's
time to stop streaming. I'll just rock on.

~~~
mikeash
Could you not just turn off LTE while streaming music and get most of the same
benefit? Or do they give you 1GB of _all_ traffic, after which you get
throttled?

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akerl_
The latter. I get 5GB of data at any speed, then Edge after that.

~~~
mikeash
OK, now it all makes good sense. From reading T-Mobile's info, I came away
thinking it was 1GB on actual LTE, with non-LTE not counting at all. Thanks
for explaining.

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sroerick
Well, every ounce of goodwill I had for T-Mobile just went way out the window.

~~~
akerl_
Sorry they decided to adjust their formula so people can use their connections
better? As was pointed out elsewhere, streaming music is comparatively low-
bandwidth. T-Mobile already offers unlimited plans where the first $X amount
is at LTE speeds, so what they're doing here is saying "for things we tag as
streaming music, we'll just go ahead and count that from the other side of
unlimited, since the effect on you/us is nil, and you won't burn LTE time on
things that can't utilize LTE speeds anyways"

