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Comment by chejazi | Hacker News Reader

T-Mobile got called out pretty hard when it was discovered they were downscaling videos [0] under the guise of their "Binge On" program. But hidden tracking cookies are far more disturbing that (noticeably) downscaled images/videos. Ultimately, the people are the consumers of images/videos. Who knows who the consumers of that tracking data might be... Obviously advertisers, but who else? The NSA?

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

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That's a very different situation: they didn't downscale anything — the service used traffic shaping which caused most services to fall down to lower bitrates but they weren't altering content, which is why it still applied to HTTPS – and that wasn't a “discovery” as much as “reading the announcement”. The emails and SMS sent to all of their customers first and those messages included the opt-out link.

In contrast, the super-cookies were only discovered by people noticing unexpected headers in the requests their servers were receiving. There was no pre-announcement and it took publicity to get opt-out instructions.

That link says they reduced the download speed, but the actual files remained unchanged.

I think they were relying on video services being able to detect available bandwidth and alter the stream to fit. Netflix does this, for example. If you have a narrow connection, you're probably going to get 240p video.

If the streaming service doesn't do this, you just get a terrible experience (buffering... buffering... buffering...).

That's why streaming on bad (narrow, high latency and/or jitter) connections is a bad idea, no? Download in the background, then view, makes much more sense.

I don't think there's one right answer for that.

Buffering is a terrible experience everywhere.

On my desktop, I'd rather wait to get the best quality video that I can get. On mobile though, I probably prefer for video to start NOW at a lower bitrate if need be. It will save bandwidth, and battery, and time and the quality is probably good enough.

I'm not a mobile user, so this is probably unworkable.

But anyway, why not download to desktop, and then transfer to mobile device? Destroys spontaneity, I know.

> Destroys spontaneity

It's exactly that. I'm sitting in a waiting room or the departure gate at the airport flipping through Twitter or Instagram and a click on a video. I don't need that 6 second video to play in 4K. That it runs instantly is the most important quality, IMHO.

my tmo network service is often a crude joke. 10gb/mo of basically trash service. at least i get 4 bars!

I switched about 6 months ago and haven't had any problems at all. Anecdotes!

Are you in an area where T-Mobile offers band 12 LTE, and does your device's radio support it?

http://www.spectrumgateway.com/t-mobile-700a-spectrum

Band 12 is rolling out pretty quickly and is spectrum that allegedly helps with a lot of issues caused by buildings / dense urban environments / long range / etc. I can't confirm personally since I don't own a device that supports LTE band 12 (purchased before TMo bought this spectrum....) but reports seem to be very positive.

Anecdotally, my TMO LTE service is better than my coworkers ATT or VZ in quite a few places.

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