Comcast starts throttling mobile video, will charge extra for HD streams | Hacker News Reader

Comcast starts throttling mobile video, will charge extra for HD streams

arstechnica.com

46 pointsseekingnames14 comments

Why would anyone use Comcast for mobile is beyond me. Not saying the others are much better, but at least you wouldn’t be helping Comshit earn even more money.

They say we can't tell the difference in quality of 420p, yet they sell us 4k displays.. I can't with this logic.

Who is saying both of those things?

This is for mobile devices.

I just got a new Samsung tv and while setting up the Netflix app I was prompted to pay an additional for HD stream.

Was there a prompt from Comcast? Or was it Netflix? The basic plan does not include HD. (https://www.netflix.com/signup/planform)

How can they do this if video is served over an encrypted connection they’re not in direct control of?

Do they just limit throughput to a bit rate that would be likely to cause a streaming service to drop to 480p?

I had the same question. They specifically talk just about video, so I'm not sure how they could limit anything over ssl/tls.

Even if they ask google/netflix/etc to limit the quality for their ips, whitelisting the ones who paid are gonna be annoying or very complicated to let the content providers know.

I remember some ISPs adding headers on HTTP requests to identity users across sites, but again that wouldn't work for encrypted sites.

Presumably they try to figure out the IPs of popular video content providers & their CDNs and throttle the bandwidth to them.

They could just throttle total bandwidth by source IP and leave any excess throttling to be dealt with by customer support.

Well that was quick.

Let's see if this supposed oversight of the FCC actually materializes. I strongly doubt it will.

The head of the FCC says the FTC is responsible so he's having it both ways by rescinding good laws with promises and having someone else enforce blatant infractions.

We would not have this discussion if the better choice had won the presidency.

mmm, I <3 no net neutrality

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