T-Mobile CEO to EFF: ‘Who the Fuck Are You?’ | Hacker News Reader

T-Mobile CEO to EFF: ‘Who the Fuck Are You?’

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300 pointstshtf119 comments

We pay the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Consumers, geeks, and the privacy/digital rights inclined. They're doing exactly what donors want them to be doing, including this Binge On thing (which is part of a larger Net Neutrality struggle).

I am a T-Mobile customer. And when they first introduced Binge On I was mostly happy (Net Neutrality notwithstanding): seemed like a fair trade, for certain sites you lost video bandwidth but in return received unlimited streaming.

However T-Mobile's implementation is bad and worse still they weren't honest about what Binge On does. It is a completely different arrangement between ONLY limiting sites that signed up, and interfering in third parties who did not, and don't even get me started on limiting video file download rates (i.e. not streaming).

The CEO is just acting like an idiot. Consumer rights groups, like the EFF, are completely entitled to "stir things up" when large national corporations start acting poorly. If you guys didn't want to be called out, perhaps you could have been more honest to begin with? So as a T-Mobile customer, I am 100% behind EFF on this one. If they started attacking the EFF regularly I'll change networks (e.g. Project Fi), because I value the EFF more than T-Mobile.

PS - Amazon's Smile.Amazon.com supports EFF donations, as an aside.

I really like the concept of the EFF, and really like most of their work, but when I was reading their blog I quickly started to feel like they go off half-cocked too often. When I first saw summaries of their report my guess was just that there in turning BingeOn on/off on a single account, or that there were temporary configuration problems on T-Mobile's side.

Some people like the idea of supporting an out-there extreme to keep the Overton window shifted to an appropriate place. I can see the logic in it, but I value truth first.

T-mobile's CEO's schtick is to act like this, and I don't really appreciate that much either, but I do appreciate T-mobile's small movements to make the cell phone market more fluid by getting rid of contracts, and I also still like BingeOn. It gives me more control over my data than Netflix or Amazon or whomever gives me.

>when I was reading their blog I quickly started to feel like they go off half-cocked too often.

While I am a fan of EFF and the work they do, I too have started to notice this recently. The title of articles have become borderline click-bait and sometimes conveniently omits vital information that may help better understand the issue. The most recent one is "Stupid Patent of the Month: Microsoft’s Design Patent on a Slider" [1] [2] which surprisingly is a lawsuit on a whole lot more than just sliders.

However on this issue I am kind of split. I agree with both EFF and T-mobile. As for T-mobile, BingeOn is optional and can be disabled anytime with just a click, so it does little to nothing to hurt customers and cannot effectively be called throttling. As for EFF, they have the right to be worried that this may set a precedent for bigger control over your data in the future.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/stupid-patent-month-mi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10802413

The fact that it's optional (enabled by default) does not change the fact that it is, indeed, throttling. There's also the fact that this throttling (regardless of what they'd like to call it) was actually happening for video services not included.

This is precisely the opposite of content neutrality, in that they're making general internet traffic intentionally worse.

Call it throttling, call it whatever you want. It makes my general internet better.

The service is optional from all sides: both the consumer and the content provider. It gives me, as a user of the general internet, more control over what I do with the internet. Not less.

It may be better if there was RFC for devices to register their bandwidth preferences that Netflix and other video services implemented, but there's not. Perhaps BingeOn is a route towards that.

"Call it throttling, call it whatever you want. It makes my general internet better"

Not mine. Sure Bloomberg, Wikipedia & other top-tier payers' windows open fast, but I find most "not popular" sites hang and drag on opening new tabs/windows... long enough for me to open a Bloomberg tab/window to "prime the pump", so to speak. Tethering to a laptop, I can watch local library or .gov window attempting to load with no in/out network traffic for 15-20 seconds. Everytime I open Bloomberg or Google, multiple previously loading tabs/windows recommence instantaneously.

How does that relate to the conversation? Who are you using for internet, and what type of weird setup is it where they deliver packets after "priming the pump"? That is not a throttling scheme, nor anything like BingeOn.

"Priming the pump" is an expreasion[1]. I am matching your favorable experience on T-MOBILE with my differing experience. The discussion is pertaining to Tmobile's throttling traffic, when non-prioritized traffic fails I have found opening a prioritized connection resumes the former, as well.

[1] http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/prime+the+pump

> The service is optional from all sides: both the consumer and the content provider.

Are you sure that content providers are opting in? I've read that services like youtube are being throttled, while not benefiting from being included in the 'free streaming' services.

And Legere was implying that Google may have bribed EFF to attack T-Mobile on Google's behalf, suggesting that Google wasn't happy; I assumed this is because Google is not happy that T-Mobile is throttling youtube (presumably) without their consent.

Demand that control from the content provider. The man in the middle shouldn't touch your content.

Yes, fantastic, over-simplied, completely unrealistic solution. It would require not only getting Netflix to give me that control, but also the devices themselves to be in on it, because the device needs to switch modes based on what network its on. The network itself is the deciding point of what bandwidth I want to use. What if I want the middleman to help with the content because Netflix and Apple and Google are nitwits on this issue, and the middle man can actually do something here? Do you think that Netflix or Apple or Google care about my demand? HAH!

There's a lot more going on here than "the pipes are filtering our data" and being blind to that means that the problem is going to unaddressed for longer.

If we allow data metering of any sort at all, then BingeOn things have to be ok. If we want to ban all provider-based data caps on wireless networks, I'm not sure exactly how that would work. And its not just data metering over wireless networks, pretty much all hosting solutions are billing based on the amount of data transferred.

> As for T-mobile, BingeOn is optional and can be disabled anytime with just a click, so it does little to nothing to hurt customers and cannot effectively be called throttling.

It's still throttling, from what I read. If it's optional throttling at the user's control and at no price difference, then you have a point in that it's not unfair or unreasonable, but only if customers actually understand that it is throttling so that they know to turn it off.

If they don't know that they're being throttled, then the ability to turn it off is moot; they effectively don't have the ability at all. And in that case users are being unreasonably and unfairly throttled.

I'm torn. I support the EFF with donations, and I'm a 14 year customer of T-Mobile, but I have no problem with what T-Mobile is doing.

The EFF has done some great work, but T-Mobile has done far more in bringing sanity back to the US mobile market.

When a company does something good does not mean to ignore when they do something bad.

And BingeOn is fundamentally bad, because its everything Comcast wanted when they were trying to slow-lane half the Internet, except nobody is in opposition to it because they see as a "benefit" rather than traffic shaping bullshit it actually is. They could have just given everyone unlimited data with deprioritization on their network over fixed data users, but they didn't - they make some heavy consumers of data "free" while leaving others against the tide of data caps, and thus harm the free Internet.

> When a company does something good does not mean to ignore when they do something bad.

Agree.

> And BingeOn is fundamentally bad, because its everything Comcast

And here's your problem. It's not fundamentally bad. T-mobile is not Comcast. T-Mobile has a limited amount of spectrum on each tower, and a limited amount of backhaul to each tower. It can in no way be compared to Comcast, who can pipe Gb/s into your home, and who isn't limited by the laws of physics for delivering bits. They can always drag more fiber. There is only so much RF bandwidth in existence.

I have a choice in my mobile provider, I do not in my local internet. If the EFF wants my support back, start lobbying your ass off to get tax breaks and funding for municipal fiber and stop wasting your time on T-Mobile.

>It can in no way be compared to Comcast, who can pipe Gb/s into your home, and who isn't limited by the laws of physics for delivering bits. They can always drag more fiber. There is only so much RF bandwidth in existence.

That argument falls flat because you can just say T-mobile can always put up more towers and lower the transmission power. The density of cell phone towers is directly related to how many radios they try to provide service for with one tower.

Putting up new radio towers isn't that easy, though. You face significant NIIMBYism wherever you want to put them.

At most Comcast would have to add some backhaul fiber. That costs nothing compared to the last mile. Adding more phone towers is even worse than a cable company's last mile, because the returns diminish as the frequencies clog.

Putting up more towers won't solve the problem RF goes everywhere the cellular spectrum is limited and with WIFI creeping into GSM bands (and vice versa) it's even more saturated now. Put more towers and your signal to noise ratio goes down the toilet.

As for transmission power well this is regulated T-Mobile can't just crank up the power. Not to mention if they start spreading out towers like mushrooms the "health and safety" nuts will pop up after them claiming that towers give you cancer and they should be removed.

Comcast and any other ISP can pretty much increase it's bandwidth indefinitely it's only real limitation is how much room it has under the ground and hint that's allot.

And considering that people go crazy when cell providers try to spread Wifi around and push people using data (and even voice some times) to non cellular wireless internet this is pretty much a mess the consumers have made for themselves.

If you live in a metropolitan area you should petition your mobile provider to expand it's Wifi network and even partner with a residential wifi sharing providers to give you more coverage. Cellular bandwidth is becoming more and more expensive and until h265 becomes a streaming standard don't expect to be streaming 1080p on your mobile devices in a dense area.

I live in London and I use maybe 500MB of 4G a month and that's because everywhere in my home, tube stations, work, and commercial areas there is a hotspot which is either provided by my carrier or my carrier has partnership with and I am getting very good download speeds all the way (I've cached the entire map of London on Google maps which was about 900mb yesterday in about 4min while waiting for the tube without any hickups).

I'd like to add that more generally, this is the situation with internet in most of Europe - it's a competitive market.

Because it's a competitive market, net neutrality matters a lot less. Providers who provide shitty service will find the market switching away from them very quickly. YouTube plays slowly? Not going to fly with the kids, so I'll find a provider who doesn't do that. The ability to buy 2MBs cable that pumps out up to 1GBs for Netflix at a cheap cheap price? There's a segment of the market for whom that's a great deal.

This also ties in nicely with fair usage caps. I'm more than happy to pay a lower rate for a "fair usage cap" of 100GB because I'm not torrenting. I think people who need or want truly unlimited internet should be able to pay for it without raising my prices.

Both these arguments are null in the US where there's such a screwed up monopolistic market.

Net neutrality matters wherever you are.

Picture if BT started offering higher bandwidth speeds or lower costs for Youtube, Netflix and Facebook usage. Yes, us superusers would switch away, but a large proportion would think that this is a great idea.

The losers would be anyone too small to bribe BT for fat pipe usage. We'd end up with the two/X tier internet we fear, and it'd be all wrapped up in the sugar pill of speeding up your most beloved services.

Comcast has limits too and it costs them real money to raise those limits. Pulling new fiber is not free, even adding a wavelength to existing fiber has costs. Their incremental cost to add capacity may be less than the incremental cost for a cellular company to purchase more spectrum (likely from a competitor) or blanket a city with microcells, but that doesn't mean it's free. In Rural areas it may even be cheaper for T-Mobile to increase capacity than for Comcast to do the same.

Comcast could probably save millions of dollars each year in reduced capital costs if they could trim their Netflix bandwidth by compressing their video.

Comcast is fundamentally different in a second way: they have huge incentives to make on-demand video over the Internet unbearable, as a way of holding on to their cable revenue.

And there's ample evidence of them refusing to interconnect with the backbones that provide a lot of the video traffic. The problem is not in running more fibers or more wavelengths, the problem is connecting ports in a meet-up room.

Comcast doesn't really care that much about decreasing the bandwidth, they care about keeping their customers on their cable service.

> I have a choice in my mobile provider

Among an oligopoly of four, one of which is complete trash, two are way overpriced and have no real competition.

> T-Mobile has a limited amount of spectrum on each tower

The spectrum is fundamentally a public resource and therefore should benefit the public, not just their customers.

> and a limited amount of backhaul to each tower.

Now, how's this different from Comcast?

>I support the EFF with donations,...

>If the EFF wants my support back...

Eh?

also,

>I have a choice in my mobile provider

What great choices those are!

BingeOn does exactly what the ads for it say it does, and is entirely optional. letting customers choose the quality is good for customers, and t-mobile isn't beholden to anyone else

the EFF has lost it's way

How has EFF lost its way? They simply reported the facts.

Without EFF, the important facts which Legere has been trying to gloss over would not have reached me.

Facts aren't good when they disagree with my worldview.

BingeOn also imposes a 1.5Mbps throttle non-streaming video files and on streaming video files where lower bitrates are not available.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/t-mobiles-binge-on-indiscri...

I cannot shrug hard enough. Big deal!

T-mobile automatically opts their customers into a plan that throttles bandwidth for specific usage, then claims they are not throttling anything and publicly bashes the EFF for exposing them. You don't see any problem with that?

I'm glad we have consumer advocates such as the EFF that pay attention to this. I appreciate all of the other things that T-mobile has done to move the US Carrier industry forward, but they got this one wrong.

There isn't anything wrong with trying to innovate, but T-mobile should have not opted customers in by default, especially without being upfront about the throttling.

> When a company does something good does not mean to ignore when they do something bad.

And likewise the other way around. The enemy of the good is the perfect.

I keep hearing this but the one time I went to the tmobile store for the supposedly cheaper offering, the price was exactly the same as what I get from ATT with less coverage.

...they go off half-cocked too often.

Playing defense is hard. You're reactionary. You have to cover every base. You have to take every utterance of your opponent seriously. It's easy to get duped. Etc.

I won't do it any more.

I've spent a lot of time fact checking, refuting, explaining. It's a sucker's game (you can't win).

"A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

-- Mark Twain (maybe)

"If you're explaining, you're losing."

-- Lee Atwater

I encourage all activists (organizations) to have an affirmative agenda. Tell me what you're for, not what you're against. Policy groups like EFF need to learn how to seize the initiative.

There is value in deep diving into policy issues. That's what think tanks are for.

@EFF: "T-Mobile's CEO is dying to know who EFF is. Friends, please tweet at @JohnLegere with the hashtag #WeAreEFF to enlighten him."

https://twitter.com/EFF/status/685216654398099456

https://twitter.com/mattl/status/685224731667087360

Well done!

Thanks for your PS reminder about smile.amazon.com (0.5% of all your purchases go to a nonprofit of your choice).

Paired with something like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smile-always/jgpmh... you can donate to the EFF without even thinking about it.

Is there a worldwide equivalent of Smile? I use it for the occasional purchases I make from Amazon US (supporting the EFF), but AFAICT there isn't a similar program for Amazon UK or Amazon JP.

Sounds like something your CC may support?

The CEO archetype is that of a a king, maybe even an emperor. It is an ego based role, not an intelligence/experience based role. It's about who you know and who will do your bidding. Underlings do all the thinking and often time in response to dumb decisions by the CEO.

That is the archetype. Many CEOs are not archetypal and lean toward being real leaders, but every now and then you will have a CEO who perfectly matches the archetype.

"PS - Amazon's Smile.Amazon.com supports EFF donations, as an aside."

God that is so annoying. I was excited to set up EFF as the beneficiary of my "Amazon Smile" - what a great idea!

And now I get a stupid pop-up confirmation every time I go on to amazon - even though they know who I am, and who I chose as beneficiary.

I have no idea why they make "smile" opt-in every single visit.

My cynical assumption is that visiting through smile.amazon.com may be used as a pricing indicator, suggesting a tolerance for higher prices.

I really hope I'm wrong, but it's the reason I never use it. Online stores use all sorts of weird things as pricing indicators.

Isn't T-Mobile one of the Project Fi networks?

Yes it is.

John Legere is the CEO of a multinational telecommunications company. Of course he knows what the EFF is.

At first, he was just trying to explain BingeOn to T-Mobile customers in a favorable way - "optimization for mobile devices to stretch the data available on your plan." And that's exactly what an informed consumer should expect him to say. You're not going to hear the words "reduced quality by default" or "sweetheart deals with content providers" come from the mouth of a man with fiduciary duty to T-Mobile.

But trying to discredit the EFF will blow up in his face. If auto company execs feigned ignorance about Consumer Reports and Kelley Blue Book, we'd laugh at them. It's a transparent way to avoid answering the questions these consumer watchdog groups raise.

> informed consumer

Even in this HN thread there are several persons who either work for T-Mobile or are starry-eyed.

I love how he says that it's not throttling, while comparing it to economy mode on a car. Which is, well, literal throttling to give you less performance but better economy.

I would not mind them offering the feature if they were honest up front about what it is. It is throttling; it is reducing the bandwidth available for particular downloads, in order to use less or none of your data plan. Now, there are still some net neutrality problems with the fact that certain service providers use none of your data allowance while others do still count against it.

But anyhow, why try to sell this as not throttling when that's exactly what it is; throttling, but you get some benefit in that you don't have to pay as much for those throttled streams?

IMHO, the CEO is being disingenuous.

I apologize in advance for this rant:

T-Mobile knows exactly what it's doing. If they had announced an open platform with open specs for implementing low-bandwidth video, and then said "if you have this, we'll use it", the end result would be that everyone could benefit from an innovation of theirs.

Instead, they partnered up with the largest media providers to save themselves and those media providers money on bandwidth. He's smart enough to know that favoring companies that "have the technology to do this" really means favoring large corporations, which is bad for the little guys.

If this wasn't true, there wouldn't be "50 new companies applying" to take part in some application process to be approved... to be on their special little Internet. By even having an application to be involved, they're creating the framework for control and favoritism right from the start.

His creepy "we're just trying to help everyone and make the world a better place" stuff is not fooling anyone. T-Mobile is in it for themselves and themselves only. Keep your corruption away from our Internet and name your service something other than "Internet".

"His creepy "we're just trying to help everyone and make the world a better place" stuff is not fooling anyone."

So do you think that his twitter cheering squad are just sock puppets?

I think he is actually fooling people - far too many people. And now, because of this scumbag CEO, there are people who previously didn't know of the EFF who are now tweeting their dislike/opposition to the EFF.

People are so disenfranchised with their current providers that they will take the "underdogs" word at face value without doing any research to back it up.

We see many sock puppets these days. Some companies do their cruel things even on HN. Sure there is a fine line between fanboys and sock puppets, but some are either that starry-eyed, are employees or even get money for their postings.

Ugh :/

That is a disturbing thought.

"T-Mobile knows exactly what it's doing. If they had announced an open platform with open specs for implementing low-bandwidth video,"

Every streaming platform since RealVideo in the mid 90s has had a way to detect bandwidth and send low bandwidth video based on the amount of bandwidth available. You can download a free streaming server right now from either Apple or Adobe that can do it.

"and then said "if you have this, we'll use it", the end result would be that everyone could benefit from an innovation of theirs."

Does he really need to provide a link to Apple's or Adobe's free offering or the $600 WireCast solution? I've set up an bandwidth adaptive streaming solution for around $2000 (Mac Mini + BlackMagic Intensity + camcorder).

"He's smart enough to know that favoring companies that "have the technology to do this" really means favoring large corporations, which is bad for the little guys."

This "technology" to stream lower bitrate video based on available bit rate has been around for 20 years.

But for that technology to work you have to re-encode the source stream for every desired bandwidth range which is not exactly cheap [1]

[1] https://zencoder.com/en/file-transcoding/pricing

if you're a small outfit, you probably don't have enough video that you need to pay someone else to transcode. You can do it yourself using freely available tools Like HandBrake and some simple scripts, and throw a few spare computers at it. I know that Apple has some tools that use QuickTime to do it - and yes QuickTime uses standard H.264 encoding.

If you care about mobile, you should be encoding for low and high bandwidth anyway.

Again, I mostly deal with live streaming but the $2000 solution I mentioned above allows you to simultaneously stream at multiple bitrates.

IMO he's upset because he feels like T-Mobile is very much on the side of the customers. As a T-Mobile customer I certainly feel that way. Free unlimited streaming for music and video? Unlimited streaming on all content for the holidays? He talks about how the industry is corrupt and T-Mobile started the Jump! program which is awesome. They are also huge in the contract-free movement.

I'm also pretty sure he's unaware of how Binge On works from a technical standpoint. Philosophically he backs it. I'm guessing it's not well implemented, EFF found this, and now Legere is upset because if EFF were on the consumer side, they would not try stir trouble with T-Mobile, because T-Mobile is making gambles taking on the side of the consumer.

Reminds me of when Mark Zuckerberg was surprised when fb's version of "the internet" was receiving very negative feedback

Is this guy an alumni of the John McAfee school of management? Never heard of him before but now I've watched some of his other stuff on YouTube some of it is pure gold....

I'm not sure how I feel about this.

I mean, Binge On is obviously targeted at customers who have limited data plans and seem likely to go over their cap if they watch video normally. Many (most?) streaming sites don't provide fine-grained control over what quality is delivered to your device. Seems like a lot still just differentiate between "normal" and "HD". So it seems to me like T-Mobile is trying to help their limited customers out by lowering the bandwidth on videos so that data is used up a slower rate. I personally have an unlimited data plan, so I can't even provide anecdotal evidence, but if I had a limited plan, I think I would appreciate that.

Once bitrate management is in place, throttling doesn't seem like a big deal. As long as I am still being delivered data at a rate > the rate at which I am consuming the video (i.e. as long as there is no buffering) then there isn't really a problem, right?

If you disagree with T-Mobile's decision to choose what bitrate is good for you, then yeah, I understand, this sucks. If, on the other hand, you are OK with this, then I don't really think there is an issue.

What I think would be the best option would be for T-Mobile to have some sort of control panel that customers could use to pick a bitrate cap for all videos that they watch on their mobile plan. Seems like that could please both parties if they started with a fairly restrictive default setting but users could change it.

The problem is that Binge On is not just 'choosing what bitrate is good for you' but is also throttling all video data, including direct downloads.

> The EFF post found that T-Mobile isn’t actually “optimizing” any video traffic for Binge On users, it’s merely throttling it. Not all video players on all websites have the capability to down-res a video from, for example, 1080p to 480p. That means some videos on some websites using some players must be watched at their original resolution (due to T-Mobile’s guidelines, these will inherently not be Binge On services). Even though this hypothetical 1080p video would count against both a Binge On customer’s data cap and a non Binge On customer’s data cap, one without Binge On will stream the 1080p video at a speed as fast as the network can go; one with Binge On will stream it at 1.5 Mbps, a speed that makes it arguably un-streamable.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/t-mobiles-binge-on-indiscri...

I've been a fan of John Legere's antics and efforts to push for innovation in the US carrier industry. However this sort of attack on the EFF and blatant lying/misinformation about throttling is a shyster move.

Wow. I hadn't read that one. Very interesting. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, but this does seem very damning.

With current video streaming services and current mobile devices not providing an easy way to limit bandwidth for video, this totally optional service seems to be putting that power into consumer hands... If you don't like it, you can shut it off:

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

If you're not tech savvy and don't know about the feature, your experience of throttled HD video may be impacted. Any calls to service or visits to company stores will alert you to what is happening and will give you remedies.

This seems to me like a reasonable compromise that meets the needs of both low-data-cap consumers and a company that wants to minimize cost of providing data services... I don't understand what is "shyster" about this.

I'm going to guess that the reason he's saying it's not throttling is because that's the explanation he's been given by his engineering team. Or he said "let's optimize video in a way that isn't throttling."

He's calling it semantics because of Dunning-Kruger. Because he doesn't really know how any of this works, but his ego is so big Superman couldn't lift it, he inflates his surface understanding to expert level.

Tmo should publish a spec that allows any provider to meet their definition of optimized video and therefore qualify for binge on. I'm totally fine with it as long as they don't get to choose who gets unlimited streaming.

As it is, and as a current tmo customer, this is eye opening. Tmo had always seemed to be the voice of reason in American wireless. What they did with contracts was a massive step in the right direction.

But this makes it look like they don't actually get it. They just happened to accidentally get a few things right.

Gee that video really made me cringe.

Hey, maybe if we dress the CEO in a hoodie, put him in front of an electric guitar with his batman figurines and make him say edgy things like "bullshit" a couple of times, the kids will relate to him!

Cowabunga dudes!

I think it's pretty genuine on his part. I was walking through Central Park back in November and some dude dressed in top to toe Pink, sporting T-Mobile logos galore ran past me. It was Legere.

This isn't a new tack. It's pretty consistent with Legere's whole schtick.

and it even seems to be working: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/t-mobile-added-anoth...

> it includes a proprietary technology and what the technology does is not only detect the video stream, but select the appropriate bitrate to optimize to the mobile device,

This sounds okay if you don't think about it too much.

I've seen what a piss-poor job T-Mobile does of image optimising, and so I feel sorry for the people stuck on the other end of a T-Mobile connection having their videos fiddled with.

It's not just image quality that suffers, everything about it is stupid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4484081

It's only going to be really scary when CPU time becomes cheap enough to re-encode videos on the fly (are we there already?). I can see some nefarious uses of watermarking, or on the extreme end, OpenCV and motion tracking for some enhanced product placement.

Lots of mobile carriers already do this with Bytemobile (recently acquired by Citrix)

https://www.citrix.com/products/bytemobile-adaptive-traffic-...

John Legere is ... interesting.

He used to look like this: http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/if4q5M1spdSM.jpeg

And now he looks like this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0Qvjw-CMAAFn8j.jpg

Are there many other CEOs who have embraced their corporate branding so seriously?

He thought he could pick on EFF like he does on other carriers. That was his worst move so far.

I'm more likely to stop contributing to the EFF than paying T-Mobile for cellular service, in the grand scheme of things.

Is their service that good? As a current T-Mobile US customer, it looks like I can get an equivalent plan from Sprint for approximately the same cost, mostly thanks to T-Mobile's aggressive competition.

I was on Tmobile for 3 years and I would say it is a budget carrier through and through. You don't go to it because it has good signal, good customer service, will work on road trips, etc. You get it because its cheaper than the rest.

I honestly thought my tmobile service wasnt bad. They gave me a free router (well lent me) and "signal booster"

The bad? On both of those things, when I went to tmobile store to return them, after about a 30 minute wait they said "You can't return it here, it came from corporate. You have to mail it"

Corporate said "No they should return it to the store."

Went back to the store and the store manager wouldnt accept it because he said when he would send them to corporate they would mark them as unreturned and charge the customer.

Went to another store. Same thing. Said corporate messed up returns.

There seems to be a very big disconnect between Tmobile stores and corporate. So much so that I canceled my service.

I'm no longer a T-Mobile customer because sadly their service does not work at my house. To fix that, I moved to Project Fi, partly because it adds Sprint as coverage (and I knew that Sprint worked here), but partly because it supports WiFi calling and handoff really well, and even if I don't have signal, I generally have WiFi.

T-Mobile's service, where it has coverage, tended to always be really quite good. That said, the thing I think people like about TMo is more about how they treat their customers than how good their network is.

Their Jump upgrade plan is (to my knowledge) the best in the business, and being contract-less is absolutely wonderful.

I didn't always love having T-Mobile as a carrier, but I just about always loved being a T-Mobile customer.

I've had friends who couldn't get their Sprint service to work on major streets in downtown Chicago, but my T-Mobile service worked on the Playa at Burning Man, not to mention that I get free edge data in 140 countries:

"Only from T-Mobile, our Simple Choice Plan makes it simple for you to stay in touch while you explore the world. Now get unlimited data and texting in 95% of the places you travel most—140+ countries and destinations around the globe. Oh, and calls? They’re just 20 cents a minute."

There's a reason I've used them for 14 years.

Hrm, anecdotally I've had real trouble with international data roaming in places I'd have expected to be decently covered with cell service, like cafes in Leith. It's a nice bonus when it works, but since it's not even reliable enough for emergencies, it's not worth any carrier loyalty. I'm curious if it worked for you.

Isn't Commnet trying to provide actual cell service at Burning Man? I feel like if you have a company specifically trying to make cell service work in the middle of the desert, with no metal buildings anywhere, it's totally unsurprising that it works.

The international data roaming has been strong enough for me to maintain clear VOIP calls in Canada and Asia.

Then you're on Sprint.

Which the 7 years prior to jumping over to T-Mobile a year ago has shown me to be an awful thing to have happen to you in life.

At this point I'd rather pay the obscene data fees at Verizon or AT&T before switching back to Sprint, where LTE coverage drops randomly (I actually liked their WiMax network significantly more!), you get text messages two days later, and phone calls to you just never arrive despite ringing and ringing on the caller's end.

sounds like your interaction with sprint was before the completion of the NV rollout - It's better now, and I'll stick around for GV integration.

Unfortunately not - NV was rolled out in my area in 2012, so I had quite a few years on NetworkVision. It was a marginal improvement at best, and I kinda feel like I'm being a bit generous in calling it an improvement at all.

I guess audio quality on calls went up?

Sorry for the late reply.

NV in my region gave a many fold improvement on data performance, voice performance came later (when the NV network launched here - even when done on 80% of the sites - there were still huge dropped call issues, because of the inability to handover between legacy and NV, and because of a lack of meaningful optimizations on the new network)

If you were deployment in 2012 - you must be in Chicago since that was the launch market - Chicago had more problems then the next 4 NV markets combined, huge build quality issues, most of which have been resolved now.

Even then - with NV you didnt see real improvement in most areas until the launch was complete, which took a hell of a long time - 2ish years for Seattle, longer elsewhere.

NV for those not in the know was an forklift upgrade of the sprint network, and involved wholesale replacement of everything from the Antennas to the Switch.

Their network improved a lot in the recent years. Their 4G network is currently the best one http://www.techlicious.com/blog/opensignal-state-of-lte-repo...

Another nice thing is free roaming in many countries abroad.

> Another nice thing is free roaming in many countries abroad.

I've (ab)used this in Canada and am currently doing so in Asia. As my envious Canadian friend described it, it's like a cellphone super power.

He's not going to be the CEO for much longer. Quite probably, being too smart is detrimental to CEO career, but being obviously dumb in interactions with the media is not tolerated at all.

There was once a CEO of Seagate that could not contain himself and said something to the effect that people "buy drives to store porn". He was gone soon there after.

I think you're vastly overestimating the repercussions here. John Legere has built his reputation on saying crazy shit; this is a drop in the bucket.

Along with outspokeness, John Legere has started many things at T-Mobile the rest of the industry adopted. He is not a lose cannon, like people are portraying here.

Why not both? He seems like a loose cannon, but one that often hits the mark. Sometimes it takes someone who is a little crazy to go against the bigger players.

Historically these types of outbursts when aimed at unpopular entities (e.g. other carriers) have been fairly popular and working well for him/them.

Problem is that they misunderstood the sentiment surrounding BingeOn and perhaps the EFF in general. I think he'll survive this one, and hopefully learns from it, but we'll see...

He has started to back down on Twitter already (if you look at his tweets from 30 minutes ago).

I have been thinking about Yishan style CEOs for a while now, as well as things like https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/679947535591473156

He's the best thing that ever happened to T-Mobile. If it wasn't for Legere, it's unlikely T-Mobile would still be in the business, let alone growing its customer base. I've been a satisfied customer for 2.5 years now.

Now that I gave it another thought. Isn't the only way to comply with net neutrality to throttle _all_ video instead of certain video? And isn't that exactly what T-mobile is trying to do here? It still sucks because it is misleading, but I sort of get where they're coming from.

No, because throttling a kind of traffic is also non-neutrality. Imagine cable companies throttling video, phone companies throttling VoIP, etc.

I'm not a T-mobile customer, but I guess the "BingeOn" feature is supposed to stop the throttling for certain video providers.

If you have Binge On turned on: all video is throttled, but video from a large number of sources does not count against your data cap.

If you have Binge On turned off: video is not throttled, but it all counts against your data cap.

You can switch between on and off as often as you want.

No, I think it throttles all video. OK, maybe it doesn't throttle video providers who voluntarily throttle themselves, but the result is the same.

Yeah, I misread. Binge On makes it so that the data from certain providers doesn't count against your data limit, but leads to throttling of all videos.

Just wanted to remind folks that you can support the EFF through AmazonSmile.

Never heard of AmazonSmile. Is it just regular Amazon but they donate a % to charity? Does it offer only a subset of their products? I'm looking for the catch but I can't see it.

It's just an overlay on Amazon.com that lets you designate a charity to receive a small percentage of your purchases as a donation. If you can buy it on Amazon, you can buy it on smile.amazon -- because they are the same site.

The catch is that you have to remember to type smile.amazon.com.

Ok, I'm making a donation to EFF.

T-Mobile customers, feel free to write to them at:

  T-Mobile Customer Relations
  P.O. Box 37380
  Albuquerque, NM 87176-7380

I couldn't find an email address.

I'm not sure how Steve Buscemi got to be CEO of T-Mobile but he's making a big mistake picking a fight with the EFF.

Neither T-Mobile nor EFF nor net neutrality come out looking good on this one. As others have pointed out in this discussion, net neutrality is a thing for broadband wired Internet where there is rarely competition, not for wireless internet where there is plenty of competition and one way to compete is to offer compelling services. But the T-Mobile CEO is a jerk and that rarely works out well for anyone.

He's the Trump of Telecom

I don't think that's the kind of personality I want speaking for a company I'm entrusting with my communications data. Save the schtick for a lifestyle brand. The EFF isn't TMO's competition, there's no reason for a profanity-laced response from the goddamn CEO of a global telecom (particularly a telecom that already attracts attention from antitrust watchdogs).

He picked the wrong target. It was fun when he was poking AT&T and Verizon who deserved it. But EFF? That's going to backfire. And especially since T-Mobile is indeed violating Net Neutrality.

Off topic:

Who the hell edited this video? There are an insane amount of cuts.

T-mobile certainly adopted the youtube-style vlog jump cut scheme. It's not for everyone, but it has certainly been on-trend for a long while now. He's also tweeting selfie video responses; I think it's good that he's participating in the culture to which he caters.

More discussion: https://www.quora.com/Internet-Culture/Why-do-popular-YouTub...

Disclaimer: I had been an AT&T mobile customer for more than a decade and subscribed with Verizon and Sprint each for a few years before jumped to T-Mobile about 2 years ago and happily ever since.

If you read through the entire EFF report on BingeOn [1], you will see that there are only two problems EFF had with T-Mobile's BingeOn program:

1. "Throttle" or "Downgrade/optimize" (pick a word depending on your viewpoint for either side) of all HTML5 video streams

2. Opt-in by default

Net neutrality debates aside, I love BingeOn since day one and didn't notice much of degradation of video quality when I watch videos with BingOn (I still left it on)

All the arguments EFF against BingeOn, T-Mobile can easily tweak their program to easily comply.

Regarding #1, I suspect it's more of a technical challenge than an illicit intent [2] (of saving data bandwidth, which of course if the win-win situation T-Mobile wanted). Some like YouTube has proprietary steaming intricacies that T-Mobile have had technical difficulties to selectively "Throttle" or "Downgrade" only content partners so it's easier to just do it for all as hinted by this WSJ article about YouTube's reluctance of signing on BingOn.[3]

As far as #2 goes, again, no doubt T-Mobile wanted to save their bandwidth at the same time get credits for it putting a marketing campaign around its practice, but EFF (given the sensitivity about Net neutrality) and YouTube(very opinionated about user experience on video quality) certainly have different viewpoints about it.

In the end, as a T-Mobile customer, my heart still sides with John Legere's latest unconventional and controversial un-carrier move because

A) I still have a choice to turn BingeOn off (though I won't as I would rather save 2/3 of my data cap to do something else and very gladly and gracefully accept my zero-rated video content allowances on partnered video sites.)

B) I am optimistic about T-Mobile to eventually figure out a way to selectively (as opposed to indiscriminately) "optimize" video content on only partnered video sites so that it will be more compliant with net neutrality. There is a technical challenge to overcome after all.

C) Despite of profanity and inappropriate wardrobes, I, as an mobile customer, love what John Legere has done for wireless subscribers in the U.S. and the direction he set for the industry. Needless to say, results are self-explanatory. [4]

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles...

[2]: http://www.androidcentral.com/bingeon-terrible-purpose-and-j...

[3]: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/11/12/t-mobiles-problem-wit...

[4]: http://www.fastcompany.com/3046877/who-the-is-this-guy-john-...

I think you meant it is "Opt-out", meaning "on by default"...

Yes, you are right, my bad :)

i would have continued to be a customer of they said "it's a technology limitation, but the benefits are great and we plan to work on improving the side effects" (even if i know for sure the last part was a lie).

The EFF? A liberal lobby.

Not at all.

The EFF cares about free speech. Is that a liberal position? Too many liberals that I know do not care enough about free speech.

The EFF cares about privacy. Is that a liberal issue? I know people all across the political spectrum who care about privacy.

Not sure if you're an American or not, but the guy you're replying to probably is. In the US, "liberal" has a different meaning than it does elsewhere. Privacy, freedom of speech, and personal liberties in general are core tenets of American liberalism.

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