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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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'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.

> 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!

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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