Verizon’s good unlimited data plan is now three bad unlimited plans | Hacker News Reader

Verizon’s good unlimited data plan is now three bad unlimited plans

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73 pointsprostoalex69 comments

Carriers must be having such a wonderful time with this new FCC.

Uhhh unlimited but it'll never be fast! Uhhh we can re-encode your video, unless it's streamed from Verizon (you know this part's coming...), deal with it!

Can't wait for VPN technology to become more widespread, so we can keep these crooks from altering our traffic.

What do you mean by "new FCC" and what do they have to do with it?

Also, was the old unlimited truly unlimited in all ways? If so, how can every single customer of any company actually get unlimited data, all the time without unlimited hardware appearing from nowhere and radio wave spectrum that expands to unlimited use for unlimited people?

Seeing down votes but no comments? This is why Reddit beats HN in every single way.

New FCC refers to the party switch in the WH changing the FCC voting commissioner makeup from 3D-2R nominees to 2D-3R.

The old plans and the new plans both defined “unlimited” as a number of GB of full speed which could degrade after so much use, so that’s never been at issue. That was a usage plan but the network traffic was not treated differently (or wasn’t supposed to be). Now the plans also perform content-based network degradation at all times, regardless of data usage, which is a shot at net neutrality for sure.

I think the 'new FCC' comment is a reference to the current FCC Commissioner being a former general council at Verizon (though it was awhile ago). Additionally, he's been strongly opposed regulation of the telecoms and opposed net neutrality for awhile. It's not all him, but the FCC has sharply changed course on net neutrality since December.

> I think the 'new FCC' comment is a reference to the current FCC Commissioner being a former general council at Verizon

This is a somewhat silly argument. I remember the same concern over Wheeler; everyone was tripping over themselves to praise him when he turned out to be pro-net neutrality.

While many of us were delighted to be wrong about Wheeler, Ajit Pai has ended up being exactly the kind of spineless corporate shill that you'd expect him to be.

Wheeler was the exception.

Pai will be handsomely rewarded for all the billions he's generated for the telcos.

Oh, I'm not questioning if Pai is/will continue to be a shill. Let's call him that for being a spineless shill, not because he worked at Verizon once. Sorry if I'm nitpicking, but it's an important distinction to me.

I think you mean the new FCC chairman:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_V._Pai

This isn't a net neutrality issue. Come to Europe and let's compare datacaps.

Treating video bits differently from image and text bits is exactly a net neutrality issue, it’s content-based filtering

But the question then becomes, is it a good or bad thing? Is it better to pay $10 per GB, or is it better to not have to worry about gigabytes, with the caveat that video (which happens currently be a high bandwidth consumer) gets throttled? Then add onto it that the video quality for many consumers is still more than adequate for the size of screen they are dealing with.

Personally, I don't do video over LTE, but I would like to use the mobile hotspot feature on my phone more often without having to worry about going over. And as long as it is enough for me to use ssh, RDP, or VNC, then I'm good. Other people, of course, have different requirements.

But RDP and VNC are essentially streaming video over the internet. How would they make that distinction?

As long as I can get 10 frames per second on a remote desktop, I'm good.

You can identify traffic flows based on any number of characteristics, port number, protocol, and data payload to name a few.

Yep, everyone has different requirements. And I think we have tested the world where, those different requirements all being equal, has served customers well. And innovation for that matter -- if video had a shotgun to it's back during its formative technology years who knows what kind of crappy technology we'd be dealing with right now.

I'm kinda in the same boat where I'm not someone who is just churning through video bandwidth, im rarely hitting 5GB across 2 phones on a heavy month. But that said I also would like to get great quality for the videos I do watch, and occasionally I'll throw a video to a tv and there you can definitely appreciate higher bandwidth there. I mean, I don't see the problem with the world where you can let applications & operation systems present choices to users, who will then set sensible defaults / pick and choose / etc. Enforcing this on a network layer is a pretty extreme measure.

IMO, as a fairly staunch NN defender - no it's not. But only so long as the limiting is applied equally to all video providers, including Verizon's own.

Traffic shaping (QoS) according to protocol is nothing new, and it can actually generally improve responsiveness for everyone given a congested network. If my VOIP packets have exactly the same priority as your Netflix - I'll be the one to suffer for it. On the other hand, if my VOIP has higher priority than your video, I'll get a good VOIP session, and thanks to buffering, you will still probably get the same quality video.

The overall drop in bandwidth being offered sucks, but it also seems a bit more honest than their previous "unlimited" offerings.

Again, this is only the case in my eyes so long as Verizon doesn't start offering a fast lane for certain providers. If (probably more "when" than "if") they start doing this, then I'll gather up my torch and pitchfork and join in the fun.

It's not filtering, it's not blocking anything based on the contents of the content or it's origin just the bandwidth it will use. Sorry but i don't see how throttling some one to oh boy only 720p is a problem... Even the fact that they have 480/720p packages now isn't an issue, Netflix charges you extra for 4K also.

That is until the multi-billion dollar lobbyists decide to push for VPN bans in Congress because only terrorists and child pornographers need privacy like that. Basically what's already happening in China, Russia, and the UK.

How is this already happening in the UK?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/20/theres...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...

Neither mention VPNs, also first link is an opinion piece.

They're traffic shaping to certain MBps, not re-encoding according to some of the articles, so a vpn wouldn't help depending on how they detect "streaming video".

But that's not what they're doing. Judging by their marketing language, it's likely their contract language does enforce caps on the TYPE of content.

If they just started somehow throttling all VPN traffic, this is easy to detect, and they'd be in breach of contract.

It still won't matter with the current crowd in the White House. Nobody will enforce anything.

So no carrier anywhere offers true unlimited? It all comes with some form of slowdowns, either right off the bat or at certain usage thresholds, and throttles video to some arbitrary max resolution?

That's what a monopoly brings. It won't take very long for other countries to eclipse the US in tech.

What monopoly? There are four major nationwide carriers. That's more competition than in: search, mobile operating systems, package delivery, and many other markets we think of as competitive.

I don't think anyone on HN thinks those are competitive markets, they're all oligopolies

Whatever else they are, they're also the expected outcome for capital-intensive markets with difficult-to-differentiate products. It would be weird if we had 10 competing nationwide carriers.

(Not "bad". Weird.)

Four nationwise carriers? They are all colluding on territories, price, features and service! Why aren't there hundreds or thousands? That would be real competition.

Why would there be hundreds of carriers? What purpose would that serve in the market? Each carrier would necessarily serve a far smaller number of customers, which would leave each with less capital to build out and maintain a network.

We had this with independent ISPs in the 1990s (I ran technical operations for the most popular such ISP in Chicago, EnterAct). It was not an unalloyed good. Most of the independent ISPs were pointless. They were each independent re-implementations of the same basic architecture, each with its own idiosyncrasies and incompetences. Some couldn't bill correctly. Some couldn't keep a Livingston Portmaster online consistently. None of them could secure an email server or reliably monitor all their POPs. Internet service was drastically more expensive, drastically less reliable, and harder to buy.

And now in Chicago all I can get is Comcast. Thanks a lot.

There's no reason why we can't require leasing for all carriers, ISPs etc, to any company that wants to lease it. That works just fine for DSL. I recall having the option with DSL. Obviously I chose my telco and had good service and decent billing. That was a fine arrangement.

When it comes to cell phone service? I can use any pay as you go carrier, sure, but not on the Verizon network? What do I get in return for that, I can use a verizon phone on any carrier. Except I can't, cuz they're violating their agreements with the FCC. Screw these cell carriers.

If you can't get AT&T in your building, then no independent provider was going to help you. Every independent ISP in Chicago in the 1990s was leasing last-mile from existing providers. I've had leases in commercial spaces in Chicago that didn't have AT&T wiring either, and gone over the price quotes to fix that. It's super expensive, and the subscriber dollars aren't there for people to do that work speculatively.

Verizon (or MFS, at the time) didn't stop leading last-mile to independent ISPs. Independent ISPs died because the economics weren't there for them: large consolidated providers offered the products 95% of consumers wanted at lower cost and drastically higher performance.

To me, this whole discussion about ISP competition is sort of bucketed in the same place my brain reserves for complaints about the fact that ISPs no longer offer shell accounts. Can you believe there was a time where the quality of the Unix shell you offered ISP customers was a major competitive differentiator? I'm sure there's a species of ISP customer that is really unhappy their ISP doesn't make it easy to run their own mail server, or have a freenix-competitive NNTP server, or offer any kind of shell account. But for the overwhelming majority of the market, Netflix matters more than any of those things, and AT&T and Verizon probably do a better job of delivering Netflix than any independent ISP would.

What? No tcsh? I'd like to cancel my service.

You think you're joking but

Verizon does indeed provide a truly unlimited plan. You just can't buy it from them. It's the grandfathered plans from 2006-2009. You can still find them on Ebay for a couple hundred dollars up front [0]. They are still 100% truly unlimited and unthrottled and if you keep the sim in a hotspot instead of a phone the video is unthrottled. I consistently use 100GB per month working remotely without any slowdowns [1].

[0]: http://therecklesschoice.com/2015/12/07/mobile-internet-and-... [1]: http://therecklesschoice.com/2017/07/29/how-we-get-internet-...

> It all comes with some form of slowdowns, either right off the bat or at certain usage thresholds

The majority of the throttling from carriers only happens on over-saturated cell towers, at that point, someone's data is going to be delayed, and honestly choosing the person who already used a lot of data seems more fair than just calling rand(), or even worse, degrading the experience horribly for everyone.

The new wording in Verizon's plans sounds like they will first degrade people on the "Go Unlimited" plans, then degrade people on Beyond Unlimited who are over 22GB. It is unfortunate that they bucketed people into two categories of who gets slowed down first, but they do have to choose somehow.

(And if the tower is incredibly saturated, everyone is going to experience degraded performance, that is how RF works, the laws of physics don't care what cell phone plan someone has!)

The video resolution thing is nasty though.

Honest question: is it economically viable for any carrier to offer "unlimited" plans, in terms of both speed and data consumed? Does any carrier have the capacity to handle that kind of traffic for all their customers in all their locations?

Seems the fact no carriers are offering unrestricted, unlimited plans is pretty telling, I would think.

Didnt verizon already lose a court case saying they couldnt do throttling and still call it unlimited?

The "unlimited" in Verizon's unlimited plans refer to the number of exceptions in their "unlimited" plans.

Lovely. I just signed up for the unlimited plan on Verizon about a week or two ago.

Now I have NO IDEA what my situation is or which tier I'm effectively in.

Worry not, you signed a contract. If they change the terms of the contract, demand they keep your service unchanged or cancel as a breach of contract.

Knowing phone companies there's probably a part of that contract it says that they're allowed to change it and that I can't sue, I can only choose to drop it without penalties.

As if I would be allowed to use a lawsuit anyway, I'm sure I'd have to use mandatory binding arbitration.

There's no need need to sue unless you've somehow been damaged. Dropping service and keeping your 600 dollar phone or returning it used is more than damaging enough for them.

Except most customers now buy phones in installments without a two-year contract. Fortunately with LTE the $600 phones work on multiple carriers.

If you sign a 2 year contract and don't get the phone you're kinda getting ripped off.

I own my phone.

Should I switch to the carrier I left because they have no coverage? The one that's going bankrupt? The other one that's probably going bankrupt tomorrow that tried to merge with them? Or maybe one of the MVNOs that's really just one of the above?

There isn't much choice available.

You stay in the same plan, none of the new tiers. They don't morph into new plans magically.

However, you're still restricted to the 720p video cap.

So it's still pretty shitty.

Given that I'm pretty sure I've been experiencing their "test" that's an improvement.

I was more worried I was going to be stuck in the 480p tier.

By default, AT&T also throttles video playback to 480p, but it is an option that can be disabled: https://www.att.com/offers/streamsaver.html (instructions listed in the middle/FAQ).

Routing traffic through a VPN should circumvent this malarkey, right?

For now and as long as not too many people do it.

Also, Netflix blocks "proxies" which generally include VPNs.

Generally speaking, there's no way to detect if you're using a VPN. They block specific IP ranges belonging to VPN providers.

Learned this the hard way when we moved abroad for a few months and wanted to get our American Netflix on.

No biggie, now we VPN into my home and use that connection to check out US Netflix: their blocking is entirely IP-based.

Exactly what I said in my comment and yet it was downvoted.

Netflix hasn't been able to block all VPNs. VyprVPN still works, for example.

Well, it's trivial to throttle VPNs for someone like Verizon.

How can they detect the video if it's over ssl? Are they just detecting big streams of data and throttling it? If so that's bad because it will certainly have false positives and throttle those.

AFAIK they're detecting IP addresses of major video services.

>> Unlimited mobile hotspot, but hotspot speeds are capped at a maximum of 600kbps

I see this as a bright spot - unlimited hotspot is great, 6mb isn't 'fast' but it's enough to be usable. And the other plan has the first 15GB on LTE speed.

Well, that's not 6Mb. It's 600Kbps == 0.6Mbps

So that's fast enough for ssh. I wonder if it is good enough for RDP, VNC, or NX protocol. I don't think it would be good for raw uncompressed X11. Also, is that available as a standalone hotspot plan, or just with a phone hotspot?

RDP is absolutely fine at 600kbps, in fact it's just fine at 128kbps and still pretty decent at 56kbps.

Bear in mind that it's not magic, so even with the improvements in newer versions that make video and audio suck less it's not going to let you stream any better than your base connection speed would allow anyway.

Anyone know if MVNOs like Ting get the same throttling?

Ting is not on Verizon. Verizon doesn't have many MVNOs, last I checked all Verizon MVNOs came with lots of caveats that made them unsable for me at the time. FWIW, I chose Ting, no traffic shaping whatsoever and no artificial limits of any kind. Of course, T-Mobile and Sprint might do their own traffic shaping, but as a previous T-Mobile customer, this doesn't seem to be the case. It works better for me now on Ting than it used to work before on T-Mobile. No throttling, no video degradation, no bullshit. Definitely recommended.

Unfortunately worse coverage then Verizon though, at least where I need it.

The article claims that all major carriers do something similar, so I'm wondering whether MVNOs are exempt.

Possibly depends on the MVNO and the type of contract they got with the MNO. On Ting you are definitely exempt, other MVNOs, not so sure. However, my understanding is that MVNO traffic has lower priority in the MNO traffic shaping, so you get affected if there's congestion.

Are they transcoding video down to 480p?

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