The main difference is the lack of a natural monopoly for wireless isps. Switching providers is actually possible so if you disagree with your providers throttling you have other options, unlike in the cable industry.
I'll try. I asked people in a reddit thread about this same issue why they don't just switch to another cellphone network. The general reply was "Verizon's coverage and reliability is a lot better than competitors." It seems to guarantee a general level of service (reliability and speed) Verizon has to put certain limits on certain data. I mean look at others. They are not throttling, but then they are not providing a reliable enough connection. Seems like the market is working. Current tech allows certain performance at certain cost. Verizon is doing a good job managing all the factors to ensure that most people prefer it's service, despite the throttling of YouTube. Mandatory NN in this context would deteriorate the experience for most users, while also increasing government involvement and the inefficiencies that come with that. Is there a flaw in my argument?
> You don't need to throttle to maintain reliability.
Sure you do. If you don't throttle Netflix to 10M, it will happily chomp away 25M of bandwidth. Add a bunch of such people nearby and suddenly the network became a lot less responsive for the people in your cell. My facebook will take a few more seconds to open, some guy on the edge of reception might not even get a usable connection.
> And you can get similar speed guarantees by balancing the available bandwidth across active users.
If the stream bandwidth keeps varying from 5 to 25M isn't that a bad thing? It's better to have a stable 10M stream rather than a variable unpredictable one.
Finally it all comes down to cost. Everything has a cost. Not throttling Netflix has a cost. It will maybe cause Verizon to deploy a few less cell towers in a year, maybe it makes them a bit slower to respond to areas needing more bandwidth or radios. Verizon has decided they want to cater to the users who value reliability over the capability to stream 4k on their cellphone. How can you fault them on that? When the tech catches up, you will be able to stream at 25M. Just like 10M on-demand video was unthinkable on a cellphone 5 years ago.
> Sure you do. If you don't throttle Netflix to 10M, it will happily chomp away 25M of bandwidth. Add a bunch of such people nearby and suddenly the network became a lot less responsive for the people in your cell. My facebook will take a few more seconds to open, some guy on the edge of reception might not even get a usable connection.
Let's say there's 40M of bandwidth in this situation, and other users are taking up 15M in total. The way to ensure responsiveness is by dropping the throughput down to something like 37M so that buffers don't fill up as packets arrive randomly. This would let you continue to use 22M for netflix with nobody else harmed. And importantly, if three people tried to use netflix at once, just throttling to 10M each would still result in an overloaded network. But giving them each a third of 22M wouldn't.
> If the stream bandwidth keeps varying from 5 to 25M isn't that a bad thing? It's better to have a stable 10M stream rather than a variable unpredictable one.
If there's enough use to intermittently drop your bandwidth to 5, then it'll happen with or without throttling to 10. Throttling can lead to more stable bandwidth than a total packet free-for-all, but it's not more stable than just splitting the bandwidth evenly among all the users.
