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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

The original comment is absolutely correct in that if the video stream is delivered via HTTPS it is impossible to downsample it. Now, whether YouTube et al actually use HTTPS for the video stream, I don't know...

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The majority of video traffic on the internet is encrypted. But it doesn't need to be downscaled directly by the operator, since almost all streaming services will adapt the actual video quality to the observed bandwidth. All you need to do is detect video traffic (quite easy to do even if it's encrypted) and selectively throttle it. The servers will take care of the rest.

Not true. You can throttle packets by source or destination IP block, and by throttling the connection, the player will be forced down to a lower bitrate rendition.

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...

So what happens when there is only one bitrate available at 1080p and it's encrypted?

Your player is going to stutter hard if it doesn't wait to preload enough of the content.

Disclaimer: My last job was infrastructure at an Internet-only video news org.

Is it possible to multiplex from various IPs? IPv6 has a huuuuge address space.

A pretty easy traffic pattern to identify and respond to (just like bittorrent or OpenVPN over SSL).

As an aside this type of thing gets me throttled pulling down 500MB+ git repos. Not T-Mobile specifically but Clear.

It doesn't need to be downsampled, though -- merely rate-governed.

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