AT&T will lower the quality of most video to 480p starting next year
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
But. There's a trick.
T-mobile now offers a single plan, "T-Mobile ONE." All videos are downsampled by default and you can't disable that without paying extra.
The customers' wallets have spoken.
Customer wallets are very silent in cases of natural monopoly like telecommunication services.
Maybe I was down voted because my comment was too brief. In the U.S. companies bid on and purchase wireless spectrum which they then own in perpetuity.
Even if you don't trust the theoretical hand-waving, the fact that the market is the way it is should provide all the proof you need (see: Google Fiber). The "problem" with utility markets is so thoroughly established by precedent that Adam Smith himself used them in Wealth of Nations as an example of an economic sector where markets don't automagically "do the right thing." There are a number of policy approaches to solving the problem, some of which are more "hands on" than others, but it's not a problem that goes away on its own.
It's still vulnerable to technological disruption though! Microwave/mm-wave internet service, which has tiny infrastructure requirements by comparison, might be our salvation if it can be made good enough. That's a difficult problem, but maybe not so difficult as trying to get ISPs regulated as utilities. Google is right to focus their efforts on it.
We can keep hoping for a disruptive technology to wipe the slate clean and give us new players/niches, but infrastructure "disruption" on that sort of scale still tends to lend too much advantage to existing players in the infrastructure game: the natural place to add microwave beaming is between existing cell towers, the satellite internet providers too mostly get bought up by existing infrastructure companies like AT&T and Verizon to shore up portfolios and make FCC mandates that they at least pretend to offer broadband options in rural areas, etc.
Beyond that, too, spectrum is finite and in spectrum auctions tends to favor existing players with war chests over disruptive newcomers. Outside of electromagnetic spectrum hopes, you are back to figuring out how to get physical wires from A to B and dealing with existing physical wire owners (the Google Fiber issues today). Something truly disruptive would be finding a way to do something crazy like IP over Quantum Teleportation and you can't exactly plan for when a breakthrough like that might (or might never) occur.
All of which tl;dr is that technological disruption is more often than not a false hope we tend to use to avoid properly regulating today's technology (or more cynically: yesterday's ancient infrastructure fiefdoms) because it may need to compete with some future technology that never actually arrives.
Lots of video providers went out of their way to jump on board. It had the support of many industry players because "Binge On", at the time, was a net positive for customers.
Now that the infrastructure is in place, T-Mobile can drop the nice marketing.
Data caps on wireless transmission (not fiber to your house) are a technical requirement. There's only so much bandwith space, and it's being demanded more than ever before. So, carriers create incentives to use less data, including data caps/limits. If grandma wants to watch House of Cards on her phone, she might not realize that, for whatever reason (poor reception, the power cable fell out of the router, etc), her phone switched over to 4G. This will protect users like her from using up ALL her data at once.
I'd gladly trade higher bandwidth costs, pixelation, freezing and skipping HD video for smooth 480p for most things.
Anyway this whole discussion will soon be moot as everything moves to SSL and AT&T can only decide wether to transmit it completely or not at all. As they should.
Classic boiling of the frog and T-Mobile is a glimpse into the future of where at&t is going with this.
Whether you think they are good or bad tmobile has had a massive impact on the cellphone industry. They were the first to remove subsidies which all the carriers copied. Now the carriers are copying their throttling model.
They win through higher fees both ways and consumers are once again screwed through artificial constraints and lack of competition.
Well, America just elected Trump to office, and here in Europe the situation doesn't look much better (crisis law in France, calls for more and more surveillance state across Europe, and right-wing populists/extremists gaining power in country by country). I'd say there has never been a better argument for VPN/Tor usage than right now.
If they only give you 1mbit/s of bandwidth you aren't going to be watching HD videos unless you are willing to let it constantly buffer, and there are also ways for them to screw with that like resetting the connection every 5min or so.
This is how T-Mobile performs their throttling, and could be done to any class of traffic.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles...
Disclaimer: My last job was infrastructure at an Internet-only video news org.