Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
T-Mobile’s Binge On Optimization is Just Throttling, Applies Indiscriminately (eff.org)
261 points by mortenjorck on Jan 4, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 113 comments



I think it is time to regulate the Internet. And before you all go ballistic on me, I mean the term "Internet". There should be a certain basic definition of the term, regulated by law. And just like you can't just put a sign up on your door and start calling your company a "Bank", you should not be able to advertise that you are providing the "Internet" without meeting certain regulations.

These regulations should be fairly basic: pass all IPv6 traffic unmodified, pass all IPv4 traffic unmodified except for NAT.

Then I would have a choice whether I want to pay for "Internet access", or "T-Mobile special limited edition we-will-modify-your-packets-as-we-see-fit networking package". Depending on pricing, the special limited edition networking package might actually work for me, but it should be clear that this is not the Internet.

On a related note, there is a similar problem in Poland: the state licensed new spectrum under the condition that the new operator would have to provide free internet to anyone who registers, for several years. Fast forward two years, and "free internet" means being disconnected every hour and having to solve a horrific CAPTCHA and go through several redirects to get any access, which of course pretty much excludes your MiFi or other router-like devices, and turns your online experience into walking a minefield (will I manage to place this order before my access blows up and I'll have to reconnect, losing the data I entered?). This problem would not exist if it wasn't for a vague definition of the term "Internet".


Here's a cynical view: if those regulations you describe would ever be enacted, "Internet" providers would rename their selective service into "ExtraNet" or something ("now with Super Fast Netflix in Ultra HD!"), with the regular (regulated) Internet access also available, but properly throttled-down. As an ISP trying to provide neutral service, good luck convincing your customers that they're selling shit and yours is the real deal. They're bullshitting the general population now, I don't see how regulating the term "Internet" would stop it (unless the rulings would cover a lot of technical details about connectivity, e.g. if you connect to a third-party IP network, you're part of the Internet, etc.).

RE Free Internet in Poland, the situation is absolutely ridiculous. The company that runs it, Aero2 (they deserve to be named and shamed), is an absolute mockery. Not only they started with the Captcha bullshit[0], they now actually advertise two options - "Free Internet" and "Internet without Captcha". To apply for the free Internet, you had to (around 2012-2014; I'm not certain what the situation is now) be personally present in Warsaw to pick up the SIM card. And pay the deposit. For the free SIM card. They made sure the paperwork is nontrivial, and the procedure not easy to discover - they did exactly what one would do if one had to provide a service but absolutely didn't want to do it. The end result is that most Polish people don't even know this service is available.

I don't even know who to blame more. Our FCC-equivalent (UKE; they're probably the nicest and most easy-going government agency in Poland) had a good idea. But whoever let Aero2 win the bid fucked up, and then the company fucked everything for everyone, and I'm pretty sure they did it on purpose.

[0] - I know. This is because they want their service to be only for personal use, and to get rid of people who download lots of stuff (for whatever "lots" you can download at 256kbps). But in the process, they've managed to fuck up the service and destroy plethora of potential applications - from MiFi equipment (dual-SIM phones are still rare in Poland) to giving your Arduino a data service to non-profit scientific measurement equipment.


> They're bullshitting the general population now, I don't see how regulating the term "Internet" would stop it

While I do see your point, a similar approach worked fairly well for banks, law practices, and medical services, just to name a few. Sure, you can get a crappy deal, but regulation helps to at least roughly separate the wheat from the chaff, and people learned to distinguish between them.


Do those apples look like those oranges? I might be able to go to Old Tony for my deposits and withdrawals, but can he give me legal advice and represent me in court? Is he allowed to drill my teeth while protesting that he's not a dentist, but a toothologist? I'm fairly certain that he's definitely not allowed to attempt a kidney transplant.


Thats the thing, though. "Umodified" Internet would not be able to be throttled down. Every ISP now is doing traffic shaping when they are setting you fixed arbitrary and often tiered data rates on your lines. That is never the limit of what the physical hardware is capable of, its a number set on their outbound WAN routing servers to accept or deny going in or out to your IP address.

But if you did have a legal definition of Internet requiring unmodified traffic, ISPs selling Internet service would have to, by definition, provide unlimited bandwidth insofar as their physical links are capable of. Which might actually be nice - we already know coax is fully capable of pretty incredible speeds, and being able to push data as fast as you can onto that link would be invaluable.

Of course, that also means the ISP has no requirement to ever upgrade their routing hardware - they would just have cheap stuff running 100% full load 24/7. But then its a consumer choice what ISP you use and whose hardware is best for the money - more expensive ISPs would be offering better routing hardware that can handle higher traffic, and cheaper ones would do the opposite. Well, that would work, if you lived in a sane country where infrastructure like coaxial lines or twisted pair or fiber to the home were public services rather than privately owned and monopoly controlled.


> That is never the limit of what the physical hardware is capable of, its a number set on their outbound WAN routing servers to accept or deny going in or out to your IP address.

I always believed ISPs were operating at saturation levels.

Off-topic, but a thing I realized now - I have no clue what the real costs for ISPs are. I suppose it's mostly a) electricity, b) amortizing hardware and c) various personnel & paperwork expenses. Is there a comprehensive source that could tell me or help derive just how much my bits cost?


You should follow Adrian Kennard's blog: http://www.revk.uk/

He's the CEO of AAISP, arguably the best and most transparent ISP in the UK (also quite a small one).

On costs, there's also contracts with other ISPs (most lines are leased from other ISPs, not leased by the ISP itself), customer hardware (routers and other gadgets), marketing, support, subcontracts for personnel across the country, etc.


Ah, the XKCD/806-compliant guys? :). I remember that ISP fondly from discussion about UK Internet filtering on HN. Thanks for reminding me about their CEO's blog!


Funnily enough, their XKCD806 "compliance" is pretty useless since whenever you call, you get someone who actually has a clue regardless. They don't have call centers. It's really nice, I miss them!


Well, they're technically compliant, and technical compliance is the best compliance! :).


some are, but the saturation is self imposed in order to bypass "peering" agreements and generate extra revenue (Netflix/Comcast for example)


I'd think anyone getting into the business of solely providing actually-the-Internet access could play just as dirty at the PR game. A marketing campaign made "we didn't use hydrocarbon-based pesticides (just enzymatic ones)" into "Organic™"; I don't see why they couldn't make "we don't touch your traffic" into "Secure™" or somesuch.

> They made sure the paperwork is nontrivial, and the procedure not easy to discover - they did exactly what one would do if one had to provide a service but absolutely didn't want to do it.

I would basically describe this as the company doing a "work-to-rule strike." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule)

> you had to ... be personally present in Warsaw to pick up the SIM card. And pay the deposit. For the free SIM card.

I'm pretty sure that cell carriers the world over try to put some barrier between people and SIM cards (usually, it's that they cost $10) so that people won't be able to pump through burner SIMs like clockwork. Governments really knowing that whoever a cell carrier gives a SIM to (in exchange for metadata about them) is likely to be the same person who later plugs that SIM into a phone and uses it. Make SIMs "free"—and also easy to get—and individuals will be registering for 50 under different made-up aliases, or people who don't need "their" SIM will register and give it to a friend, etc.


The solution is to have mandatory terms/keyword for internet-but-less. Something like 'partial internet access', which must appear in any promotional material and take up x% of total area a la mandatory cigarette packaging.


I think it's mostly a philosophical issue in terms of how much government/regulatory involvement you want, knowing that you don't have to be a strident libertarian to understand that we can all die death by a thousand lashes via regulation. I tend to think that 1) T-Mobile has several competitors in the US 2) Consumers, who are so inclined, can research fairly easily and compare providers side by side and 3) Switching, especially if you avoid locking in via buying your phone, is relatively trivial.

Based on that I feel like we just hand this one back to the market to decide. I think articles like this are important in that they are easily reachable by Google or Bing to help you decide whether an offer really is legitimate or compelling.


On the contrary, buying your phone basically locks you in. Yes, you can theoretically transfer your phone between some providers, but your Internet tech is unlikely to port well.

I think it's fair to say there are very high switching costs between US carriers due to wireless chip fragmentation. Averages at least $200 to switch if you want a halfway decent phone, more if you want a nice phone.


I'm not locked in, all of the local providers are just shit.


> I think it is time to regulate the Internet. And before you all go ballistic on me, I mean the term "Internet".

Then companies will just invent their own term that they will use instead of using the word "Internet".

We already see this with the term "broadband", which has a legal minimum speed (formerly 500 kbps, recently increased to 2.5 Mbps). Instead of increasing the speeds so they can continue using the word "broadband", we see hotels advertising "high-speed Internet" or "$ADJECTIVE-fast Internet".


Hotels might have a reasonably fast uplink but still cheap out on the wifi infrastructure. When reception tells me "the wifi works best in the lobby" I know what they're really saying is "management cheaped out and didn't want to buy the grade or quantity of hardware needed to deliver on promises."


> These regulations should be fairly basic: pass all IPv6 traffic unmodified, pass all IPv4 traffic unmodified except for NAT.

Erm, pretty much NOBODY does this - even today. Every packet you send out from your ISP has (and has had for at least 4 years - probably longer) headers, cookies, etc. injected long before it reaches the public Internet. Then along the way more companies inject things into it. Then the load balancers at the other end likely do as well.

This is not all for evil purposes, either: lots of DDOS and botnet traffic gets blackholed thanks to these optimizations. Trouble is, the ability / need for legitimate network management requires tools that can also be used for less awesome purposes, and those less awesome purposes are usually how you can justify the money for the tools in the first place.

A lot of people on HN seem to have a purist view about how Internet traffic should be handled once it leaves your house. The companies that actually manage said traffic haven't shared this view or even operated a network that looks remotely like it for a decade or more. Your data is everywhere; and if it's not being sold by your ISP (which it is) it's being sold by your bank, by Amazon, by Google -- pretty much anyone you do business with on or off line.


Every packet you send has headers, cookies, etc. injected long before it reaches the public internet? really?

Not for TLS (https). Not for vpn connections. Really, pretty much never. It was big news when it came out that Verizon was doing this to mobile data connections.

All that happens to the IP header and everything inside is perhaps the ECN bit being fiddled, TOS bits being zeroed, that's it usually. And, as mentioned before, NAT.

For home cable or fiber internet connections, the NAT usually happens on your device, on your local network (and under your control if you reject the ISP-provided cable modem and use your own, or put the FIOS router in bridge mode).


> It was big news when it came out that Verizon was doing this to mobile data connections.

Because the other ISPs were sneakier and were only injecting their tokens when the user was visiting a site that was paying for the service. Other ISPs had been running similar schemes for years, but it flew under the radar because it was only active when the user visited certain sites. Verizon fucked up and released a half-baked solution and people caught on. Other companies were better at it.

> For home cable or fiber internet connections, the NAT usually happens on your device, on your local network (and under your control if you reject the ISP-provided cable modem and use your own, or put the FIOS router in bridge mode).

Most ISPs are running a carrier-grade NAT solution of some sort. A lot more happens in the access layer than most people realize.


Maybe wireless ISPs, maybe wired ISPs in Asia, but not wired ISPs in the US or Europe.


Well, in this case T-Mobile is not modifying your packets, they are just slowing them down, so maybe they would still qualify?


Ok, add "no selective throttling based on packet content" to the definition then. I'm sure it needs to be worked out, but my point still stands.


Why?

It's not like there is unlimited bandwidth available. There isn't. If people followed your plan no one would have any bandwidth for anything. At least this way it's just video which can handle it.

Your cure makes things worse, not better.


Bandwidth is not limited by protocol. If you can offer HD video streams you can offer plenty of bandwidth for just about every other use. Congestion is real, but it takes place at specific times of the day. Outside of that a customers using bandwidth is irrelevant to your bottom line.


Bandwidth isn't limited by protocol but the effects of latency vary widely. It'd be really helpful if the discussion could shift to prioritization and reservation so ISPs could implement a better version of this feature where e.g. any traffic flagged as latency-tolerant costs less but you could simply pay to have a greater share when the network is congested.


Your trying to micro optimize things that cost ISP's effectively nothing. Further, the rest of the internet is going to ignore your high vs low latency tag so all an ISP is going to do is decide which network a packet ends up on. Sure, it might make a slight difference, but far less than your probably thinking.


> Your trying to micro optimize things that cost ISP's effectively nothing.

Have you looked at how many billions of dollars ISPs spend for wireless spectrum or deploying cell towers? Buying more is neither fast nor simple, so there's a real benefit to figuring out how to allocate a naturally limited resource fairly. The approach of charging for total bandwidth consumption doesn't do a good job of this since it's only a crude proxy for the actual problem.

> Further, the rest of the internet is going to ignore your high vs low latency tag

QoS has had various standardized forms for a long time so “the rest of the internet” hasn't been a factual statement since at least the 90s, although it's certainly far from a universally-deployed feature.

More to the point, however, we were talking about the last-mile network which tends to be both the most congested and the only point where pricing is surfaced to the user. It doesn't matter whether, say, a backbone provider does anything other than deliver the packet if your wireless carrier does use that flag to throttle packets at different rates when the network is congested. Many ISPs have already deployed equipment capable of doing this but the industry billing models do not reflect that, which is something I'd like to see change.


Texting demonstrates wireless companies love to charge based on protocol independent of costs. Also, throttling bandwidth does not necessarily hurt latency. So, simply charging more based on congestion is more useful than high vs low latency packets. If customer X is willing to pay 5$ to watch a cat video online wireless companies would live to be able to bill this.

As to upgrading networks, the wireless industry is pulls in $187.8B per year and spends $32.1B on capital investments. Yes, the network is expensive, but it's less important to there bottom line than you might think.


I would like there to be options — 1) "Internet" which means IP traffic, cap it or throttle if you wish, but without "better" or "worse" providers of content and all the other options, which do whatever the marketing department thinks the customers will bear.

I really don't see how it follows that "no one would have any bandwidth for anything".


The cool part of this argument is that if you limit bandwidth, you can get more out of people by doing less.

(Adding bandwidth/infra is expensive - vs - finding ways to charge people more or double charge them for what was normal)


Every ISP selling tiers of speed, or even having a set speed at all, is modifying your traffic. The theoretical maximum throghput of a network link is often magnitudes higher than what you get - when you switch from 3Mb/s to 1Gb/s Google Fiber, Google is not changing anything physically, they are just setting a database entry on if you are paying customer to "true" and then their packet scheduler that controls how fast data goes to you and how much data they take from you changes the limits it sets.

But there are always limits, every ISP uses them, and to not modify traffic would be to create an... interesting online experience. It would mean sometimes you get incredible bandwidth while at others you get none because everyone else is saturating the lines fully. It means you can have long strings of dropped packets just because your outbound gateway server is overwhelmed, and it would mean backups in the network would build without respite and get worse over time because the traffic saturation will spread to all possible nodes and slow them down with overheating.

When ISPs build their networks out and setup the switches that connect their effective LAN of customers to the broader WAN they build around fixed amounts of total bandwidth everyone can use at once, and then often undercut that significantly because not everyone will be using all their speed at once. But the rate limiting means you can have predictable maxima bandwidth, whereas with uncapped speeds your up and down packet rates would vary wildly based on physical conditions.

That being said, I would much rather we had that. It would taking full advantage of our available networks, and we have some breakout great network scheduling tech like codel to better handle fully saturated pipes than back in the 90s when this all became standard. Routing would of course be more expensive - you would not only have to expect greater peaks of bandwidth usage by far, you would also need to build your routing infrastructure better to handle full load saturation for extended periods of time.

So I guess I mean I agree - unmodified traffic being the definition of "Internet" would be great. But my point is that we do not have anything close to that now.

PS: Is this not a symptom? The problem is, for Internet access, either extremely restricted access to wireless transmission (private ownership of radio wave frequency is incredibly insanely stupid) or private ownership of physical infrastructure wire into your house. In either case, competition is extremely limited if present at all, and the markets are saturated with giant national corporations who have enough capital assets to devour startups and corrupt politicians into biasing the market in their favor.

If anyone could start an ISP by hooking up their own servers to a coax line on one end and fiber on the other, or anyone could start a phone company by building a cellular tower in their back yard, this would not be a problem. I mean, it would be, but it would be the kind of moral and ethical problem software freedom is - the onus then falls on the consumer to give enough shits to not buy Comcast-SuperSpeed-Facebook-Only-Terrornet for $5 less than actual Internet. The problem then becomes... most people would not, because they aren't using the Internet as global access to anyone anywhere, but as TV stations for Twitter and Facebook. But like I said, then it would not be a technical problem, but a social one, in the same way getting people to care about software freedoms is more about how nobody gives a shit than any particular barrier to entry for free software (besides IP as a whole incentivizing the creation of proprietary software, but thats a different rant).


> Every ISP selling tiers of speed, or even having a set speed at all, is modifying your traffic.

Seems like you've got a different definition of "modifying" than me.

If a post service decides to send another package faster than yours because the other sender paid for priority, would you say they modified your sending? No. You told them your package doesn't need to arrive as quickly.

Opening and analyzing every package to check if contains a DVD and prioritizing those without can be called modifying your sending though. Especially if they say they improve the DVDs.


Except that is not how ISP data rates actually work. It is more like the post office tells you it will arrive on X date, and if its late... too bad, "traffic saturation" or "network downtime". But if they have delivery trucks idle and drivers with nothing to deliver "today", your package will just sit in the box for the date is meant to be delivered because you bought your fastest possible speed, not the minimum.

If Internet worked like post you would have the situation I describe, which I'm not even advocating for, I'm just saying ISP QoS and rate limiting is traffic shaping.


The problem is not having a maximum speed IMO; the problem is having a maximum speed that discriminates based upon the type of content being requested.


this is a very small consequence of something larger: false advertising.

internet that is not internet. food that is not what is written on the package. cars that require tens of thousands over the displayed price to be like the displayed picture. software with bugs or emulated screens.

... the only thing that must be regulated is advertising. with the added benefit that if you screw too much, nothing of value was lost.


I guess I'm going to be different and actually suggest that I think Binge On is fine.

Almost all video streaming services will downgrade the stream quality if they get a 1.5Mbps pipe, and any that don't are at a competitive disadvantage to anyone who is streaming from a phone and who actually only has a 1.5Mbps pipe. It's built into most of the streaming protocols to downgrade on a slower connection. Source: I worked with video streaming on the client side when I was at Amazon, and additionally researched other options to the one we settled on.

So T-Mobile is asking users to choose between a (potentially) lower quality video stream in exchange for getting tons of video streaming options for free. This reduces load on their network, because people were obviously streaming anyway, and has convinced the biggest providers like Netflix to voluntarily reduce their bandwidth consumption to 480p in order to get free streaming to T-Mobile customers.

At best I would say that better user education could be called for, or potentially forcing the users to make an opt-in/out decision, but honestly I think the users would hate the interruption. This is clearly a situation like the European cookie permission law: If you force them to ask the users whether it's OK, sure they will ask, and that will interfere with the UX and piss off users.

I'm fine with it being opt-out; let T-Mobile email or send a notification to everyone about how to opt out if they want, along with an explanation of the consequences, and let them decide whether to click the "opt out" button.

Not "because T-Mobile," like another comment implied, but because it's a fine trade-off, and anyone who cares can just disable it. More than 480p on a tiny screen is nice sometimes, but I'll take free 480p over the cell network and watch my 1080p video when I'm at home on wifi.

I also love to be able to stream music for free on T-Mobile. That's a feature I use all the time. Even my more "fringe" music streaming services are supported. This doesn't seem to me to be anti-competitive, and T-Mobile isn't charging anything to stream the music, so I think it's pure awesome.


Thanks for providing this perspective... It sounds like most people who are complaining about the Binge On service either:

    1) Pay for Unlimited data and thus don't need to manage their data usage to avoid overage.
    2) Don't use video services enough on their phones to hit their data cap, and thus don't need to manage their data usage to avoid overage.
For a fully voluntary service that was loudly promoted and can be turned off, it sounds like this implementation is a worthy trade-off for people who would rather not pay for extra data.

It was unilaterally turned on because most people will likely not notice the difference and will simply reap the benefit of less data used (while letting TMO optimize their network usage). Those who do can investigate and deactivate it at will.

This sounds remarkably close to win-win-win to me...


Maybe I'm in the minority, but I would like to be asked when changes like this occur. I don't consider it an inconvenience, but then again I care about things like net neutrality and my privacy.


Well, I heard about it from T-Mobile directly and from several other sources as it was splashed over the mainstream news, on here, on Reddit, and in other media. They aren't keeping it a secret. And in every article they mention that you can disable it; so if you care, you can.

I strongly care about net neutrality, too. And I wouldn't personally care if they texted me with a "reply with 'disable' to disable Binge On" text message, but too many people with no clue of the ramifications might disable it.

You'd really need to force people to learn something that 98% of T-Mobile customers don't care about -- and I would find it annoying to be forced to learn something that I personally find obvious.


> I strongly care about net neutrality, too. And I wouldn't personally care if they texted me with a "reply with 'disable' to disable Binge On" text message, but too many people with no clue of the ramifications might disable it.

T-Mobile customer here! My plan supports BingeOn, and I received a text message from them with a link to a webpage with full details, including information on how to opt out.

I think they've handled this perfectly. No association other than a satisfied customer for 14 years.


I honestly didn't even really know what it was until I dug into the EFF article, and I'm a TMO customer (I've unsubscribed from nearly every non-account info email they send, so maybe I missed it?). Again, probably in the minority, but I do care -- especially since the "benefits" of Binge On don't apply to my unlimited account.


> Well, I heard about it from T-Mobile directly

Was this email or text? I'm on T-Mobile, and this is the first I've heard of it. Just searched my email and there's no mention of "Binge On", and I'm not seeing anything in my texts from them.


I, on the other hand, couldn't give a damn. Nothing is more annoying than some notice telling me they're downgrading my video. Couldn't care less to know.


To add to your point, you couldn't care less to know that your video was downgraded because you are still happy with the downgraded 480p quality.


They don't have to ask you because new T-Mobile plans are opt-in for existing subscribers, they don't switch people over automatically, you have to ask them to switch you to the new plan.

I am still on the classic Simple Choice plan, myself, partially because I don't consume enough video for BingeOn to be compelling, and partially because the new plan doesn't offer my current 3GB add-on -- I'd have to change to a 6GB add-on for more money each month. I don't use my 3GB as it is, so it doesn't make sense for me to switch.


Not sure if I understand you correctly, but I, an existing subscriber, was automatically enrolled in Binge On. Like I said somewhere else, I didn't even know what it was until I read the EFF piece, and it seems like something I was opted in to for TMO's benefit, since my unlimited plan doesn't come with data caps.


Interesting, that does seem connected to your unlimited plan. I do not have unlimited data and I was not automatically enrolled.


> At best I would say that better user education could be called for, or potentially forcing the users to make an opt-in/out decision, but honestly I think the users would hate the interruption. This is clearly a situation like the European cookie permission law: If you force them to ask the users whether it's OK, sure they will ask, and that will interfere with the UX and piss off users.

T-Mobile provides a text message with details about BingeOn, and allows you a setting to opt out if you'd prefer higher quality streams (with using your data quota as a consequence).

https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-24294#tutorial1


I got the text message (and of course I'd read about it in tech news for weeks before), but I've never seen the option where it's supposed to be. It's just not there under "Other Services" for me. Wasn't there at launch, wasn't there a month later, and still isn't there today.

I'm not going to call someone over this though - I don't watch video on my phone! I just want to turn it off on principle. Well, what can you do - all the other carriers are easily more evil than T-Mobile.


> Almost all video streaming services will downgrade the stream quality if they get a 1.5Mbps pipe, and any that don't are at a competitive disadvantage to anyone who is streaming from a phone and who actually only has a 1.5Mbps pipe.

Yep, and this actually has some really annoying side effects for people with a lot of bandwidth but a low data cap. A lot of services have ways to manually control it, but some are surprisingly obtuse about it (Netflix).


Netflix uses adaptive streaming to stream their videos. It is inherently a greedy algorithm; if the stream determines there is bandwidth available, without a throttle Netflix will try to go to 1080p (or whatever the highest bitrate available for that stream).

Consumers with LTE phones + data caps benefit the most from BingeOn. Possibly, they are a significant % of T-Mo consumers and are happy with the trade-off.


> It's built into most of the streaming protocols to downgrade on a slower connection.

You could tell that to PBS. Their mandatory ads are HD only and can't stream smoothly on low bandwidth links. Of course now that they've implemented a paywall for video it won't be an issue anymore as I spend my time elsewhere.


Well, PBS is using a screwed up or misconfigured streaming server, then. As I said above, they are therefore at a competitive disadvantage.


Ideally Binge On would only apply to the supported video providers, rather than throttling all video. However, there are rather three imperfect approaches to the problem:

1) Hacker's approach: Route all mobile traffic through a VPS/VPN using an OpenVPN client, available on all relevant mobile platforms. This way your mobile provider only sees VPN traffic. This will also bypass HTTP header injection used by Verizon and AT&T for third-party tracking. You won't get the free bandwidth from Binge On, but at least your provider won't be watching your traffic.

2) Active customer approach: Turn off Binge on. The problem here is that the customer won't be able to take advantage of the free video streaming provided by Binge On.

3) Regulatory approach: Have the FCC enforce net neutrality.


(1) and (2) seem equivalent from the perspective of bypassing "Binge On"; (1) has the general benefit of encrypting all traffic, but no special benefit with respect to this particular service.

Also: (4) Switch cell carriers. Unlike localities that lack multiple local ISPs, cell carriers have extensive competition available to choose from.


> (4) Switch cell carriers

Do that, and end up with metered bandwidth for more money.

T-Mobile gets a pass from me because they have unlimited bandwidth and better prices. If that's what they need to do to make it happen, I'm all for it.


Maybe you are unaware or treated better than I was. I left T-Mobile when I discovered their definition of 'unlimited' meant that after using 10GB, your connection becomes throttled to around 250kbps for the rest of the month.


No, they have a genuine unlimited plan (for on-device data) these days. The only exception is if you are connected to a congested tower and have used more than 21 GBs your traffic will be de-prioritized (which in practice means under 100 kbps throughput).


News to me; their "unlimited 4G" plan is supposed to provide unlimited 4G, not limited 4G and unlimited low-speed data.


Does making it optional remove #3?


It is optional. It's just opt-out instead of opt-in.


I opted out as soon as I could. I'm on unlimited so it doesn't make sense for me.


Never attribute to malice and all that... but it's rather unfortunate that they silently opted-in customers with unlimited plans who don't really get and benefits


Well, it's one way to mitigate the tragedy of the commons. You don't get much direct benefit from YOUR bandwidth use being reduced, but you do get benefit from everyone else's bandwidth use being reduced.


I hope so. T-Mobile is trying to provide their customers value that other carriers don't provide.


I very much doubt this is about 'providing value'. This gives them the general benefits of throttling users on the heaviest form of data use, with PR spun around to sound like a feature.


Binge On takes $45/month worth of data usage and gives it to me for $0 if I'm OK with throttling video to 1.5mbps. That's money in my pocket, and makes my phone more enjoyable to use. That's a feature providing huge value, not PR spin.


I've actually just left T-Mobile BECAUSE of the shady stuff they are doing with Binge-On. The "all of our customers LOVE Binge-On!" is absolutely not true. Looking at you John.


You left T-Mobile instead of just turning it off?


T-Mobile has had a reputation as a reliable "outsider" with less coverage, but better business practices than its competitors as well as better rates.

If T-Mobile is going to throw that reputation down the toilet then there is no reason for me to have 2 bars in my house in downtown Chicago.


LTE Personal Cellspot is great!

Also, "two bars" may not actually be bad. If you are getting slow speeds, dropped calls, etc, then sure that is bad.


I get echoey awful voice, and it takes 30 seconds to load hacker news. Ditto for most of my commute on the "el" (above ground)


The only leverage you have is the money you pay... if you leave, and tell them why, then they are motivated to change to stop loss. If you stay, then they are welcome to try other shady things that you may not catch.


Absolutely. In the process of doing so. It's more about the fact that they WOULD do it, not so much that I can "opt-out". It's bad enough that it's even happening-- it's 10x worse to me that it's "opt-out" and that they are flat out lying about it to people.


The only problem is you'll be switching to someone like AT&T, who happily MitM your connections to insert extra ad-tracking cookies and the like.


Sadly, you're not wrong. So I'm stuck trying to find the evils that I'm most content with being forced to put up with.


Just turned it off for myself. Thanks for the tip.

https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-24294


Well it's just more dramatic that way.


Well, it'll likely only be a matter of time before you can't turn it off.


Admittedly, I live in Puerto Rico and T-Mobile is one of the few providers that have solid 4g coverage on most of the island. BUT:

For $95 a month I get 14gb regular tethering, and these streaming services. Combined with the true unlimited 4g I get to my normal phone. My phone has HDMI-out, and I just connect it to my television. I've never once seen 480p video since this started using this strategy. I'm considering getting a cheap phone that has HDMI out and setting up a separate account to do this on and keep it at home all the time.

I'm pro net-neutrality, but living on an island with somewhat-atrocious internet has led me to consider this the best thing ever in my day-to-day life entertainment wise.


I have so many problems with T-Mobile's Binge On and this is only making it so much worse.

So now it's:

* only providers they deem important enough to give the service to can use it (everyone else just gets their requests ignored)

* it MUST be unencrypted to get the no-data-usage benefits (I might be wrong on this one, i can't find where i read this)

* it needs to be done through a "blessed" app or it's not covered (For example, soundcloud is covered, but soundcloud through a browser is not...)

* video in the service needs to be heavily compressed (with no way of showing the user that this is happening or who is doing it or why it's happening)

* Now it comes out that video not even covered by the service must be heavily compressed... Again with no notification to the end users that this is happening, leaving them to point the blame at the site itself (netflix, youtube, etc...) since all other sites work fine.


> * it MUST be unencrypted to get the no-data-usage benefits

I haven't seen that one mentioned anywhere. Clearly they only recognize and throttle video from other servers when unencrypted (since they don't throttle other downloads from the same servers), but for services signed up with T-Mobile's "Binge On", it seems easy enough to ignore the bandwidth usage based on server IP, rather than sniffing file types. Do they really recognize the servers they partner with based on traffic sniffing rather than IP?


I thought all of the music apps that joined their program earlier had that imposed on them, however I can't seem to find where i read that so i might be wrong there.


It's IP range or http URL pattern matching, we had to provide this information when we joined the music program. Interestingly they also try to exclude the related ad traffic, if any, but that's challenging due to how undocumented and varied ad networks are.


During their uncarrier launch event their CTO mentioned that they share certificates with partner services so they can inspect and do their magic on HTTPS traffic. I can't actually look up the video archive right now due to traveling, but I specifically remember it during the Q&A session at the end because I was curious if there was some MITM action going on.


>* Now it comes out that video not even covered by the service must be heavily compressed...

Actually if you read the article, it says there is no compression happening at all. Just throttling.


I guess i should have worded that differently.

It must be heavily compressed to play-back without stopping.

So unless the server has the ability to change the bitrate on the fly, the video won't stream right at all.


I have a neat idea: someone should implement a VPN-over-"video", so that all traffic (or at least server to phone) is not counted against data caps.


Doesn't sound too difficult, if you don't mind several second ping times.


This is a good example of why providing some traffic for free (as T-Mobile previously did with some music services, for example) should still be considered a net neutrality problem, and be opposed.

ISPs should just be dumb pipes. Route my packets to and from the internet. Charge me for traffic and be done. Anything beyond that and you get into perverse incentives where their desires may not line up with those of their customers.

This sort of video optimization sounds like it could be a valuable service, but if so then it should be done beyond the ISP level. Set it up as a separate service, proxy traffic through it, and do it that way.


> ISPs should just be dumb pipes. Route my packets to and from the internet. Charge me for traffic and be done.

You can do that if you want. There are tons of services that charge you per byte.

They cost more, and people hate them. But if that's important to you, go for it.


I thought most ISPs were just dumb pipes, and the move away from that is still pretty limited and proceeding fitfully. As far as I can tell, both my wired (Verizon) and wireless (AT&T) ISPs work that way right now, for example.


Nobody is moving to per-byte or per-gig billing. Everyone is moving away from it. It was a nightmare when I worked at an ISP that had clients still being billed per gig from early 00's.


It is legitimately worrying that they throttle non-streaming video downloads and streaming of services which aren't part of BingeOn. There are several cloud storage solutions which stream the video as it was uploaded (i.e. if it was 1080p when uploaded, they only stream is back at 1080p), so this scenario will be absolutely destroyed by BingeOn, making the video unwatchable, plus any kind of download for offline viewing.

I'm tempted to disable BingeOn after this. I mostly watch YouTube anyway which isn't even included, but will be limited by this "feature."


I look forward to the day when Mobile & Cable companies are just dumb pipes of data.


And then you pay per byte?

It used to be that way, people hated it.


What does this have to do with paying per byte? The problem is that the pricing is based off of data speeds, but you don't even get to use them the entire month.

You hit a 300GB data cap with 75Mbps connection in less than 9 hours. If you want to be able to use your connection for the entire month you would get just under 1Mbps.

They should charge for the total data or the rate, but using both is ridiculous. Infinite Internet speed with a data cap is worthless to me.


Among techies, the most popular model seems to be the "fixed pipe" model. A set max data rate, unlimited bytes. Conveniently for them, the model essentially results in non-techies subsidizing their consumption.

That wouldn't be the case if it wasn't for fractional allocation, but nobody wants to pay for true fixed allocation.


The problem is that a max data rate usually doesn't some with an SLA. ISP's obviously don't have enough bandwidth for all customers to fully utilize 10 gbps 24/7, for example.

Paying based on usage solves that tragedy of the commons problem and works for utilities.


"But value-added!" (an universal term meaning something that has absolutely no value whatsoever, but is the newest invention designed to rip customers off)


This is all an artifact of non-dedicated circuits. With a dedicated T1, for example, you know what you are getting and the circuit is idle when you are not using it.

With a shared circuit, advertised "peak" and "average" bandwidth is all virtual and is managed via QoS, and is based on expected usage patterns and leveraging the anticipated lulls and peaks. It's very similar to financial arbitrage.

So it may be the case that reducing the risk of sudden, simultaneous peak events allows the overall network to be much lower cost and more performant for other uses.

T-Mobile is trying to squeeze out the most value for its users at the lowest cost. If a user wants a dedicated circuit, those are available from other vendors.

Perhaps in the future carriers will offer circuits with QoS specifically tailored to different categories of users. It seems like custom QoS could be offered to individual users and priced accordingly. I'd happily tolerate lower max video download bandwidth in exchange for a lower price b/c I rarely watch video on my phone.


See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10821781 for the typical vendor equipment feature set implementing this kind of feature. I find individual user profiling as shown in screen captures towards the end of the document more concerning...


Does Binge On subsume Music Freedom?

The latter let me stream Spotify and Google Play Music without counting against my data cap. However, something changed around November 2015 whereby Spotify, Pandora, Google Play Music, et al cease to function over T-Mobile data on all my devices. Even spotify.com is inaccessible.


This whole issue could be avoided if T-mobile offered two check boxes instead of one. One to enable/disable Binge on, and other to apply same process to unsupported services.

I believe they have been fairly clear to what it does to supported services, but it was certainly new to me they would do the same to unsupported services like Youtube.


I was a bit surprised by this statement: "it’s pretty obvious that throttling all traffic based on application type definitely violates the principles of net neutrality". Setting aside the specifics of what T-Mobile is doing in thsi case, I thought the 'neutrality' in net neutrality was about neutrality of content provider, not content type. If I throttle all bittorrent or video traffic equally, it might be annoying to my users but I don't see why it is not neutral.


It is if your definition of neutrality is all packets should be treated equally regardless of source or contents.


I actually like this better than the thought of them altering the video stream themselves -- the video provider would normally have the responsibility of sending an appropriate bitrate for the current connection speed, and they would be in a better situation to give the best quality video for a given bandwidth.


It took me a while to find the page to opt out of Binge On, so here's the link for any other TMO customers who want to turn it off: https://my.t-mobile.com/profile.html (under the Media Settings tab).


Reading the bit, it seems like the worst you can say about T-Mobile here is that the implementation is a little clumsy. I don't get the indignant uproar. Since when have new ideas been perfect at rollout?


I am happy with T-Mobile's Binge On. Irrespective of what T-Mobile is doing I would like to keep that service.


As much as I want to believe they do, I don't think most people care. Most Reddit threads on this are 75% "No, no! It's different because T-Mobile!" .




Consider applying for YC's W25 batch! Applications are open till Nov 12.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: