YouTube and Netflix ‘Throttled’ by Carriers | Hacker News Reader

YouTube and Netflix ‘Throttled’ by Carriers

bloomberg.com

390 pointsjonbaer220 comments

"Carriers say they’re throttling to manage internet traffic. To deliver the videos people want to watch on their phones, sacrifices in speed are required, according to the three largest U.S. wireless companies"

Moving from the US to Switzerland a few years ago really opened my eyes to how much US wireless carriers were fucking me as a customer.

On Swisscom, my mobile provider, I get unlimited unthrottled data (with tethering!) for ~$99/month. With this I get speeds > 100Mbs on the "good side" of my apartment. And 60Mbs on the "slow side" of my apartment:

I also get these speeds in the Alps.

For another point of comparison Salt (rebranded Orange here), offers a home internet plan of 10 Gbps + 250 TV channels + a free Apple TV for $49 / month.

https://fiber.salt.ch/en/?utm_campaign=saltfiberen&utm_mediu...

Part of the problem is that when you point out things like this, Americans on the Internet frequently react as if you are insulting their nation and invent nonsensical reasons for why their Internet must be slow.

I'm an American and I understand why my internet is slow. So do all of my friends and coworkers. What do you propose we actually do about it?

Vote and encourage others to vote. Also, it’s worth pointing out comparisons to Europe and Japan to help dispel the myth that we are a shining light to the rest of the world and that we are number 1.

Support things like this https://savecompetition.com and similar initiatives that are constantly being brought up. Enable providers like Sonic to survive by telling your representatives.

As an American I really wish I had enough money to start my own ISP which had ground rules that all it'd ever be is an internet provider with the sole goal of continuously improving internet service.

my cursory research seems to indicate that it's pretty reasonable to start a local wireless ISP, with a lower bound wrt minimum number of clients to make the venture worth it being 50 or so according to someone.

It requires some money and resources obviously, but neither do you need to be Google or a Telco to setup an ISP:

About a year ago, FOA was contacted by Greg Turton of Cordele, GA. who was curious about what was involved in creating a FTTH network. Greg is a real estate developer who also owns several local hotels. Where he lives and builds homes is way outside of a service area that anybody wants to build good broadband, forget FTTH. Cordele itself has a population of only about 15,000 and is one of those small cities along the Interstate highway that are everywhere in the US.

We answered Greg's questions and led him to some of the FOA Guide web pages and YouTube videos about FTTH to get him started. More conversations discussed how to get connections as an ISP, types of components and suppliers, etc. Fortunately the local electrical utility has lots of fiber but they were restricted from building their own FTTH network because Georgia was one of 19 states where lobbyists for the incumbent providers got laws passed restricting their ability to operate a FTTH system themselves. But they were more than willing to lease dark fiber to Greg at really good rates. And there were good choices on getting an Internet connection.

...

http://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/appln/FTTH-DIY.html

You might want to checkout the YC startup Necto[0].

[0]: https://apply.nectolab.io/

Shut down FCC. That's all it would take.

Sure, your FM radio would stop working, but that's a small sacrifice to make, to get actual competition in something as important as telecommunications.

This is the worst solution posed here. If we had no FCC, large companies would be thrown into an arms race to pump as much RF as possible into the air while smaller ones (radio stations, anybody?) would simply be drowned out and crushed.

Just like in the wifi band... oh, wait.

I'm not saying that radio use can't be regulated. I'm saying that FCC is the worst possible organization that could be imagined to do that regulation. To understand that, simply compare Europe to USA.

Shut down FCC. That's all it would take. Sure, your FM radio would stop working, but that's a small sacrifice to make, to get actual competition in something as important as telecommunications.

Good idea, I was just thinking that I hate how emergency services can talk to each other, and my cellphone works. People are so damned soft, they should have to release a homing pigeon if they want to call 911! Sure, a few people might die and life will be a dark and terrible nightmare of RF interference, radio astronomy will end, and modern civilization will grind to a halt, but that’s a small price to pay for my libertarian wet dream.

FCC is uniquely bad among USA government regulatory agencies. I'm fine with EPA, FTC, OSHA, FAA, etc. All of those place reasonable limits on human action. They don't say, "this market will be 40% VZN and 45% ATT!" Any number of other agencies could keep the emergency services bands online. Most of the actual regulation of how devices radiate signals is already controlled by voluntary associations of manufacturers.

Please don't discuss your wet dreams in this forum.

Dunno, having an actor to oversee the behavior of telecoms would be an advantage, not the opposite.

In our neighborhood, we're waiting on Spectrum to finish their infrastructure install. We were initially in talks with AT&T to come in too, but they backed out when we couldn't do community agreements (beyond easement) again and we wouldn't agree to them using the existing infrastructure (which was terrible) from the previous provider below. No other provider, asides from HughesNet, is willing to come in now that there is a non-exclusive agreement with Spectrum for easement access. Moral of the story, companies aren't going to act with consumers' interests at heart. Didn't Charter or someone have some agreement where part of some merger approval required that they built out into rural areas? A requirement they didn't comply with?

The provider we had before was absolutely terrible with $90/month spent on a basic DishTV package + 3Mbps internet. They had an exclusive easement, but due to constant outages because the infrastructure couldn't support the community, we were able to finally get out of it after 6 years and lots of lawyer involvement. FCC wouldn't get involved, but having the government take a more active oversight role would be a good thing, in my experience.

The fact that no provider will serve this neighborhood without exclusivity is contingent upon the woeful state of telecom competition in USA. If it were regulated like e.g. automobiles (basic requirements, but nothing about a particular vendor "owning" some portion of the market or the road), then you'd have a choice of WISPs. You might not get a wired connection, depending on density etc. As you can see from the European contributions to this thread, wireless can actually be very good. If the neighbors wanted to go in together for a really big fat wireless connection in higher portions of the spectrum, the "last block" could still be wired. That would be an easy upgrade to fiber once that made sense. Market forces would still govern that deal, because of those WISPs.

I pay ~$25/month for my phone. My internet is slower because I don't care about watching Netflix or youtube on my phone, but I could pay more if I wanted. As an American, I don't really care what Europe has because it in no way affects me. I would suspect most Americans also don't care about Europe as it is an ocean away and is made up of tiny nations that most Americans couldn't be bothered to spell

When providers are claiming they CAN'T do something, you absolutely should care when half of the Western world already has that thing they claim can't be provided...

There are significant logistical differences between the US and Switzerland.

One has 327 million people and an area of 9.8 million square kilometers (36 people per Km2). The other has 8.4 million people and 41 thousand square kilometers (216 people per Km2).

Switzerland has one of the highest and fastest internet penetration rates in Europe. If you rent an apartment, cable is often thrown in as part of the cost. The rest of the people's landlines are ADSL (which isn't very fast unless you use the latest ADSL2 dslams), or VDSL, which you can only get if you're very close to a CO. Finally, fiber is easier to roll out when you have a smaller population in a smaller area.

Most Americans cannot get VDSL, and the DSLAMs are old. Cable is pretty fast, and fiber is slowly getting rolled out, but it's a big freaking country, meaning this is expensive as hell.

The mobile providers in Switzerland only have to provide a very small number of broadband equipment and mobile towers compared to that needed to cover the US. Also, the same equipment used in Switzerland covers up to 6x more subscribers, because of increased population density.

The US has to provide much more equipment and installation over a much larger area to cover a comparatively smaller number of subscribers. So you have to literally buy more equipment to cover more area, and then you make less money because the equipment covers less subscribers on average. Upgrading the equipment then also becomes significantly more expensive.

One is extremely expensive, time-consuming and difficult to cover with high speed broadband, the other is not.

There are significant logistical differences between the US and Switzerland.

One has 327 million people and an area of 9.8 million square kilometers (36 people per Km2). The other has 8.4 million people and 41 thousand square kilometers (216 people per Km2).

Okay, but here in Sweden, with a population density of 22 people/km2, my mobile 4G internet plan has unlimited data, unlimited calls and messages for $55/month. I use it for both my phone and my 4G router at home. It's my only Internet connection since I live in a very rural place (a village of ~150 inhabitants in the north). I get about 13 Mbps downloads -- it would be much better if I was closer to a tower.

In cities in Sweden, which are all very small and not very dense, you can usually get 100 or 1000 Mbps fibre connections for something like $40 a month.

I am also not aware of a single cell data provider in Sweden that has ever tried to disable or charge for tethering.

Sweden has the 4th highest internet usage in the world, the 5th highest mobile broadband usage in the world, and the second fastest average internet speeds. So, you may not be the best comparison either.

In Wyoming, USA, the population density is 2.31/km2. But 100% of the people can get at least 10Mbps internet, 79% have >25Mbps internet. But again, big states, bigger country, and due to both governmental differences, differences in internet providers, and the different costs of providing service in different regions, we don't spread the cost of service out evenly.

It looks really easy when you're looking at the problem from 40,000 feet. On the ground, it's much more complicated.

I don't get the deal with tethering here, either, but I think there are probably reasons for it. If any provider here just threw tethering in for free, while undercutting the cost of the competitors, people would flock to them. The fact that this doesn't happen means it's probably hard to make money on it, for reasons unknown.

I've had tethering for years from t-mobile in the US. I've had at least two different plans over that time, and I don't recall ever having to explicitly request it or pay extra to get it.

In 2006~ish, I think I had to pay t-mobile about $10-20/mo to be able to tether my Moto Razr at fairly low speeds but unlimited data. By the time I jailbreak'd an iPhone for use on the network, I didn't have to pay anything extra beyond the plan data, so it's been quite a long time.

Like all the other US providers, plans change frequently, very few have unlimited plans, and none that I know of have unlimited-speed unlimited-data tethering plans.

Currently, for $45, the best you can get on T-Mobile is 4GB of unlimited-speed tethered data, and for $70 you can get 512KB/s tethering. The cheapest mostly-unlimited data plan (including fewer limits for tethering) for one line costs $95. Older plans, which had cost less and had less limits, have been mostly phased out.

Another sad irony is to get the cheaper plan, you have to get a credit check, which dents your credit score, just to acquire a "pre-paid" plan. Also, T-Mobile's website seems to have been scrubbed of their prepaid plans, so probably you can only find details via interrogating their salespeople.

I don't want any of those features and bill is 75% less. I am relatively frugal and prefer to invest/save vs spend. I am very happy not spending $100/month for a cell phone

That's ignorant of you to say

> Americans on the Internet frequently react as if you are insulting their nation

I'm surprised someone on HN would make such an overly broad, and with it, inaccurate statement.

Personally, I've seen a lot of debate. Not all of it constructive, but rarely (if ever) anything like "omg, you bastard. #murica ruelz"

> someone on HN would make such an overly broad, and with it, inaccurate statement

You must be new here!

I really dislike the double standard on HN. Such statements are given an echo chamber effect if it fits a certain narrative.

Sure, something can be said about inherent community biases and the like, but it doesn't change the fact that minority opinions are drowned out many times while noncontributing noise is upboated bc it pokes fun at America, Trump, Bezos, or whatever boogeyman exists.

But here we arw

It's rarely that. It's usually a superficially constructive claim - America can't do it because it's not dense, America can't do it because it's too populous, America can't do it because its cities are too dense or too sparse or too far apart or too old or too new, America can't do it because Americans prefer what they have.

They'll usually have some irrelevant statistics. Presumably total population, total surface area, some other such superficial analysis.

I never engage in these discussions. This is the first time, and probably the last. But I've seen them time and time again.

It probably should be left to individual states to work out to a large extent. That said, I really do think that common carrier rules should have been applied and stuck to very early on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17919077

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17919170

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17919093

So yeah, there’s that.

Not all of us. The US is great, but not perfect. I love hearing about how other places are better. It gives hope and a goal for improvement here.

I pay $435/month for my office and home internet as well as 3 mobile phones.

Wat.

In Canada I pay a total of 88$/month for home internet and 2 mobile phones, with the internet being high capacity and pretty fast even for large data transfers.

That is CAD as well, so that's about 66$ USD

$435 per month just on internet!?

$30 of that is for an iPhone contract, so really only $405... $145 for office, $75 for home, the rest is for mobiles.

The flip side of this is that there's a contingent of Europeans who look down their noses as Americans, while having basically no comprehension of how utterly ridiculous it is to do something like compare the United States to Switzerland on any metric.

As I see it people in the US believe that the whole of the country needs to be treated equally. If you live in rural Kentucky your internet speed has to be the same as someone who lives in NYC. Pointing out that New York is the economic engine the US runs on and deserves to get priority makes everyone upset.

I thought the meme was that Americans were fiercely individualistic and that Europeans were outcome-egalitarians? Of course the picture is more nuanced than that, but I've never heard the reverse before.

I think you could not be more incorrect about this. The FCC does sponsor efforts to make sure that less developed areas are getting broadband. However, I would argue that this is similar to electrification programs a century ago, and is more about access than equality.

From my experience, Americans care very much about what speed and reliability is available within their neighborhood. They care very little about access outside of their neighborhood.

Let me fix this for you:

Nobody likes to hear that they are lower on the priority totem pole, however, everybody understands when new businesses go after the biggest markets first.

If somebody is going to be upset by investing first in the areas with the most people...then you really have to disregard their point of view.

I live in a rural suburb and have had one of those cell-phone-over-ethernet setups in my house to handle the poor signal. I understand.

There most certainly are a bunch of Europeans who act holier than thou. That's silly on their part. But you most certainly can compare the countries.

Their relative differences are factors in the comparison. The US also has smaller administrative units you can compare with other countries with appropriate caveats.

You're not getting this at all. They are incomparable at so many levels:

1. There is a vast difference in population density, total population size, and total land mass, as discussed up thread.

2. Switzerland has a homogenous culture that has been extant for several hundred of years at a minimum and you could make an argument for over a thousand years. The western half of the US wasn't settled by Europeans until 150 years ago.

3. The U.S. has had both massive immigration from abroad as well as massive internal migration for the last 200 years. Aside from a few cities in the north east and south, there is essentially nowhere near the level of cultural continuity in the US that exists in most European countries.

4. Aside from the shared language, the cultural differences between various regions of the US are akin to the differences between Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe. Do Hungary and Germany agree on most political issues? Do Sweden and Italy?

5. The US culture is dominated by a settler/pioneer mentality because, up until about 50 years ago, if things weren't great wherever you were, you just uprooted yourself and moved West to find new opportunities. Nobody has been able to do this in Europe at a comparable scale for 1000+ years.

6. Switzerland does not have anywhere near the level of racial heterogeneity that the U.S. has. Not only does the US have a huge, underprivileged ethnic group that is descended from slaves, we have obtained a new huge underprivileged ethnic group in the last 60 years.

[edit] 7. Almost forgot to add: most US infrastructure, especially on the West Coast, was built during the automobile era.

So, no, they are not even remotely comparable.

What do 2-6 have to do with the actual subject of telecommunications? I’m not even going to bother with the details of 2-6, I’m just curious what point in context you thought you were making.

Telecommunications are infrastructure, building out or changing infrastructure requires political will and collective coordination. It’s much, much harder to gather political will in a place as politically and culturally heterogeneous as the US.

The person legitimately asking for differences in the two countries has yet to be given an answer, if you’d like to constructively answer instead making broad generalizations about users from entire countries.

I was amazed at the wireless coverage in Switzerland. Was hiking in remote parts of Eiger and had full LTE signal. Here, I can't even get signal in the middle of an urban areas oftentimes

> For another point of comparison Salt (rebranded Orange here), offers a home internet plan of 10 Gbps + 250 TV channels + a free Apple TV for $49 / month.

And in Switzerland, this is a little controversial because that 10Gbit/s is shared with up to 64 neighbours (GPON) while the Gigabit providers give you a more dedicated line.

I wouldn't even have a problem with that if I was told up front. Just don't give any individual neighbor priority.

I get completely unlimited LTE data (but no tethering) for $55 a month in the US. These plans exist if people are willing to look.

Edit: removed population density comment because people were inferring an argument or defense from it, when that was not the purpose of it.

Man, you get cheaper and better 4g in Russia, Kazakhstan, and ...Mongolia out of all places.

That logic is invalid.

I don't think prices are a good comparison. You will have much higher prices in places where wealth exist. There is much more wealth in the US than Mongolia or Russia. Maybe a percentage of total income would be the best comparison.

That holds true in comparison in that regard very well, if not better.

Per someone else's comment, then, explain Manhattan having such sucky speeds.

Unless you stipulate there's a goldilocks population density; if it's lower than that you don't get the investment, if it's higher than that there's too many people for the amount of spectrum/infrastructure. In which case, fair enough; are the places in the US that fall in that zone reaching speeds equal to Switzerland? I would contend no, not consistently, but of course, I'd need to know what that zone is.

Let's compare to Manhattan.

Switzerland has the same population as Manhattan.

Switzerland has a population density of 196/km², Manhattan has a population density of 25,846/km².

I'm not absolving the plundering by US Telcos, but there are legit issues as to why cell service quality might differ between a major US metropolis and Switzerland.

This is an argument against US operators. Higher density means higher utilization and therefore ROI for each cell tower. European cities with higher density than Manhattan have far better mobile and wired internet.

but higher density also means much more interference so it is technically much harder to achieve good speed

Does that apply to ethernet lines though? Those would still be dwarfed by other economies' speeds, right?

Stupid Apple removed the Ethernet jack from my phone.

Hilariously, with their addiction to USB C and dongles, haven't they now provided a reasonable ability to connect Ethernet into your phone?

iPhones still use the lightning port, and Ethernet to lightning ports are a bit on the pricey side.

Also, while I hate t link to a lifehacker article, the lead photo is pretty hilarious in terms of the need for that many adapters to connect an iPad or iPhone to Ethernet and to keep it charged. (https://lifehacker.com/hack-together-a-way-to-connect-an-ipa...) Android isn't much better, but at least it uses a more common and cheaper USB-micro or USB-C.

Not an expert here, but aren't there more constraints such a spectrum if you have more population density? You can only fit some much data in an air band no?

Build more towers. Which ofcourse means investing money and not paying dividends to investors.

I pay €35 per month for unlimited 4G, internet neutrality included.

I think the GP is talking about saturation of the frequency band. "Build more towers" doesn't solve this problem.

It does to a great extent. You provide more towers that each has a smaller coverage area.

Ah, sounds like I'm mistaken then.

Also there is cell sectorization, which is why most cell towers are arranged in triangles of antenna arrays.

> Build more towers.

Not always doable and never free.

Not always doable, but who is asking for free service?

I already pay for shitty service. I would be willing to continue to pay for improved service.

You will also continue to pay for the shitty service if you have no alternatives.

Yup

Case study: South Korea and its population density but still achieving immense success.

Manhattan's population is only ~1.6 million, whereas Switzerland's population is ~8.5 million. During weekdays, Manhattan's population increases to ~4 million.

It would be more correct to compare Switzerland to all of New York City.

Oh sh*t. My mistake, I confused NYC with Manhattan. Thanks.

Funny, Canadian ISPs defend their price gouging by saying Canada's low population density is to blame...

As do American companies, even after being given subsidies to build out to those companies.

It's even weirder when some of them are executing massive stock buy backs when complaining about the lack of profitability.

This point might make some kind of sense if there were comparable service in areas of the US with approximately 196 people per square km.

But service like this isn't available anywhere in the US, for any population center, at any population density.

It's a red herring. Crappy US telecoms services have little to nothing to do with the population densities of the areas they serve.

Sorry, just to clarify this. The argument here is that by having too many customers in a very dense area companies are unable to invest in infrastructure to serve those customers economically?

Serious q: would investing in infrastructure solve this problem? Is there enough bandwidth / switching capacity to cram 8M people into one small area and still have reasonable latencies? I provided the analysis as a reason why there might be an issue, not a definitive claim, which is why I carefully chose my words.

Amazing! Normally its the US has too low of a population density to possible offer comparable prices to Europe. Now its the opposite. I will never cease to be amazed at the rationalizations.

Please note I chose my words carefully. I was not asserting I was correct, or as you put it "rationalizing", I was asking. Son, snark just makes you look dumb when you don't actually read the post.

> Switzerland has a population density of 196/km², Manhattan has a population density of 25,846/km².

That would be a valid argument id Switzerland had worse connectiond, but apparently in spite of all the challenges the service is far better.

So what are the policy differences between Switzerland and the US, and how can the US improve things?

In Australia I noticed my downloads from some sources were much slower than others.

I have two examples:

1. YouTube vs Netflix. When I would try to watch YouTube in the evenings it would not buffer fast enough for continuous playback. While Netflix would. I assumed that my ISP was prioritising Netflix traffic. When I turn on my VPN YouTube plays much smoother in full quality.

2. Steam downloads. When I would download a game off the automatic download server is would start at full speed (Blistering 100mbps on NBN...) and after a few seconds drop down to single digit kbps. When I switched the download server to the Singapore one I would get constant full speed downloads. Could either be throttling that specific server, or there is something wrong with that server.

I switched ISP and now both of those issues are gone.

From my understanding that points pretty strongly towards throttling. Though admittedly my knowledge may be lacking.

Note: This is for a wired connection. But I thought it was relevant anyway.

Can you name the guilty for your fellow Aussies? Also Netflix might be better / not throttled due to their OpenConnect program which would be saving the ISP traffic https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

The first example is more likely congestion than throttling, but that's only really a difference in the manner that your ISP is being cheap (and not having enough bandwidth upstream).

Using a VPN in this case is probably causing your traffic to take a different route than everyone else's youtube traffic, thus avoiding the congestion bottleneck.

Netflix may have a local cache nearer to you, so you don't hit the congestion (and the amount of content in a Netflix cache is probably a lot less than Youtube).

Example 2 could be a packet-lossy network which causes your TCP connection to ramp back. If it's constant packet loss, your TCP connection will probably get slower and slower: TCP uses packet loss as a signal it's going too fast, but if that's not the cause of the loss, your connection will just keep getting slower.

> but that's only really a difference in the manner that your ISP is being cheap

Doesn't that depend on the peering agreements? How do you know it isn't the case that problem at the links isn't due to the video service paying for insufficient bandwidth?

Where the bottleneck exists is difficult to pinpoint, for sure. Especially just based on a vague description. I'm making some assumptions.

Isn't TCP a lossless protocol? I thought it ended the session if the packets were dropped.

Edit: downvoted for asking a question. Thanks reddit.

Packets can be dropped and TCP will retry (among other things; packet loss is a hueristic.) It won't just cut the session on some amount of packet loss, that would lead to constant failures.

Whenever you send a packet in TCP, the recipient sends back an "ACK" packet confirming receipt. If some timeout interval passes, the packet will be sent again. This means that some packet loss will not interfere with a TCP connection.

This is used for congestion control: Imagine you have a computer with a 1gbps LAN hooked up to a 100mbps network. You can send packets at 1gpbs over the LAN, but 90% of them would be dropped at the speed change point. The TCP stack will notice it is losing packets, and will throttle itself accordingly.

TCP is actually more complicated than just this, but this is one of the more important parts.

My anecdote doesn't quite explain the symptoms you had, but as an Optus customer I would find terrible download speeds correlated with Sea-Me-We3 being damaged. Local sites or content cached in Australia performed fine (for obvious reasons).

Recently it seems it gets damaged every four months or so. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEA-ME-WE_3#Service_disruption...

If you're on Optus cable it could also be that they have let the network fall into disrepair due to the NBN eventually replacing it

Optus was (and probably is still) slow, but extra slow at the times SMW3 was broken.

I don't know how things currently are, but YouTube was a mess.

I worked for an ISP (in Russia), and in the early 2010s, we had quite a lot of complaints about YT videos buffering. We've checked our network very carefully and found no signs of any trouble. And we've confirmed issues and were able to reproduce them even when the network was least busy. We've tried to re-route traffic via different uplinks, even messed with the DNS records a little bit (I admit this grave sin) - sometimes with some temporary improvement effect, but mostly to no avail. And of course, we've talked a lot to our peers. This was quite a major headache, and we were out of ideas what else we could do (we weren't anywhere large enough to get a Google Global Cache server). Then Google did something (IIRC, mid-2012), and we've stopped getting the complaints.

With VPN you're probably hitting different YouTube servers. I guess we should've tried to route via some VPNs too, not just physical peerings we had. Never occurred to us at that time.

I left that company in 2015. Don't know how things are now.

My point is, even without a malicious intent sometimes things look the way you describe.

I do remember someone mentioning at some point that most video codecs were never intended for realtime streaming. That was in a blurb for a new video codec intended for streaming though, iirc in the context of video conferencing. Might be related, I'm not sure.

In that context it was because most video algorithms are designed to chunk, which reduces bandwidth at the cost of increasing latency. That's a good trade off for Youtube, but not as good in a real time scenario like video conferencing.

It's not related. Companies like Youtube and Google don't do real-time encoding of their video streams, they encode "offline" (= prior) and stream the already-encoded video many times. So real-time'ness of video codecs is not relevant to this topic.

It could also be that your ISP has a Netflix cache server but not Google's (or vice versa.)

It could also be bad peering / routing.

Netflix will always be much, much faster because there is a peering box inside your ISPs network. So when you are watching a movie it's only pulling the data from somewhere geographically pretty close to you.

It's also testing network speed and will adjust quality on the fly to the user.

Google has peering boxes too.

But at Netflix' scale? I mean Netflix has a relatively fixed offering, something that will fit in a unit in a datacenter with content updates at most once a week, whereas Youtube gets 500 hours of video uploaded every minute.

Generally you are going to connect to Netflix or Google and then it is up to them how they serve their traffic. Presumably only a small percentage of YouTube videos gets a lot of the traffic. They could even control that by which videos gets suggested. Which would be my personal theory why Google search results have arguably been getting worse. Because they seemingly have a lot of incentive, both in terms of load and ads, to serve the same things to many people.

Sure, but if you don't share the taste for mass pop culture (which, as a HNer, are unlikely to), then you'll never hit the peerbox cache.

Netflix small fixed library is significantly better for cache hits.

It generally doesn't matter that much. If you miss the cache you are going to hit Google's network, which will serve from their own data center over their own networks. That mostly isn't paid for by the ISP, but Google's customers. The problem with wireless is that the wireless part isn't Google's network nor "fixed" infrastructure. So it becomes costly for the ISP.

Wireless towers are fixed to the ground just like the fiber they rely on for internet connectivity.

Google and Netflix peering boxes mean that ISPs with peering boxes at the same peering point can download as much as they want, within reason, for free from that peering box.

You might be confusing CDNs with peering boxes. As might I.

At home I used Centurylink's "home" class of their DSL connection. At work we had Centurylink's dedicated ethernet connection. I could never really watch youtube at home because it would pause, buffer, play 5 seconds, buffer, etc. Once I VPN'd into work (which was 2 miles away) I could watch youtube without issues.

I'm sure it's a technical issue or something, but that is my experience with Centurylink and Youtube.

Now I use Verizon and only have issues with youtube when it's "congested."

I have discovered that Stan (Australian Netflix competitor) tends to stream a lot more reliably than Youtube and adult streaming sites.

I have a time warner cable subsidary as my ISP.

I started noticing throttling from my carrier about 2-3 months ago. I blocked 2 common CDN access points and everything just went so much faster.

https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/youtube-running-slow-on...

I still had hit or miss issues every so often and get throttling, but I noticed it was substantially less over time. This might be purely ancedotal though. But the only issues I had were youtube throttling, I ran speedof.me tests during this time and its been fairly consistent

#4: Update the Flash

I think Flash can be safely removed. I've been flash free for at least a year and all major content sites are supported.

Time Warner Cable the company no longer exists. It was acquired by Charter Communications.

Time Warner Cable the internet brand also no longer exists. It was rebranded as Spectrum (Charter's existing brand).

I'm not exactly sure how to interpret your experience since it sounds far more like congestion than throttling. By blocking CDN endpoints you were inadvertently routing your traffic to somewhere uncommonly hit which had more available bandwidth.

Isn't congestion and rerouting supposed to be automatically managed by TCP-over-IP (more or less) ?

To me, the real question isn’t if the mobile carriers throttle video, it’s if they equally throttle video. Video throttling has been happening for a long time. But what I’d really like to know is if a carrier (say ATT) was throttling Netflix, but not their own DirecTV app. DirecTV is already zero rated on ATT, but I’m not sure if it is also throttled.

Precisely. It's fair to opt to throttle large downloads and video streaming, if that's what they need to do to ensure that other users have fast access to other services like maps, search, emails and so on. That's completely reasonable, no one user should be allowed to saturate the connection to a cell tower with a video stream or torrent download.

I can understand that it's easier to just select the biggest sources of traffic and throttle them, but that doesn't make it okay. The least they could do to show good faith is throttle their own service.

No it is not fair or reasonable. If I get a certain plan I should be able to utilize it to the full extent. If a company is incapable of providing the service they should not sell that service plan.

I sort of see your point, but what you're arguing is that they should just change the wording of the contracts. You're not going to get what you want anyway.

We ran into that issue with the marketing department and upper management when I work at a telco. We where starting to sell 3G USB modems, and "plan" was that we'd start to push internet via 3G, because it was 7Mbit at the time and that would be plenty fast. There would be no need to sell ADSL connections anymore.

The issue, which the people responsible for the network pointed out is that the 7Mbit was SHARED. It assumed that the user was alone on that tower. Also there's a limit on the connection to the tower it self, these are fiber now, so not a major issue, but a limiting factor at some point.

Internet via 4G is certainly faster than 7Mbit now, but it's still a shared capacity. If you surf the net, check your emails and such, it's in burst so it's fine to share. Streaming is you using a constant amount of traffic for a sustained period of time and that's not what the cell network is designed to do.

That is fine if I don't get exactly what I want, but companies should not be allowed to blatantly lie and over promise. Do I get to violate the contract for the service I was unable to utilize? Companies need to stop over promising and under delivering and hiding behind a 20 page one sided contract.

I don't really see where the blatant lie is. ISPs never advertise dedicated speed and most have long documents describing how they manage their network.

What do you want their marketing to actually say?

But should an ISP even be able to see what the connections they're offering are being used for? I guess they can at least see IP addresses even when it's a https connection.

Pretty damn hard to route something when you don't know where it is going.

What they could do it look at the target device. If a device have use X Mbit/s over the last Y seconds sustained, then just start throttling it until the sustained traffic stop and then un-throttle. In that case they don't need to look at the actual traffic, just how much you're generating. That would also hit all services equally.

I think people would mostly choose a cheaper shaped connection over a more expensive best effort connection, so I wonder if laws preventing shaping are a good idea.

(Laws requiring clear advertising and disclosure are a great idea...)

I have never understood how it is fair or open that a few providers are allowed to hold the rest of the Internet hostage because they are popular. Why should downloading a random file be throttled because people like to watch YouTube in 4k on their phone? It seem reasonable that someone should pay extra for that, whether that is Google or the consumer. Unfortunately the Internet is very messy and manual, so the current solution is lacking but that doesn't mean that the problem isn't real.

> That's completely reasonable, no one user should be allowed to saturate the connection to a cell tower with a video stream or torrent download.

That's reasonable but I don't see why this requires throttling specific services or types. By all means ensure that it's fair for everyone but maybe my file download is just as important as your email. Why should all file downloads be slowed down?

We know for a fact that TMobile throttles streaming video to 480p [1], which has always been fairly clear and not too deeply hidden.

[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/binge-on-streaming-video ('What is Optimized Streaming')

What’s not so easy is going through their approval process to become zero rated. They claim to be equal to anyone that wants to implement “their tech” but are reluctant to work with anyone that isn’t a large company.

Note: that was a few years ago and I have no idea what’s changed. I gave up trying to deal with them.

t-mobile has mostly gotten rid of zero rating. Zero rating only matters today on legacy plans and hence a reason they aren't adding any new services to it.

No study needs to be done. The carriers are publicly admitting this on their websites, just go look at their plans.

The more expensive plans have "HD-streaming" of video content. They even tell you X plan gets you 480p and Z plan gets you 720p. What else could this mean other than they are throttling videos?

Usually the fine print will say that these are expected video qualities based on the downstream bandwidth provided, not that they're literally charging you for each specific quality.

To the point, I was offered via email a reduction in my monthly bill if I volunteered to have any and all videos streamed to my wireless device force delivered as an SD stream. There was also a separate email offer to lower my monthly fee for home internet connection if I agreed to allow them to inject their own advertising in my network traffic.

The problem with all of that, is how do I know they are not doing it anyways? I don't trust these ISPs any further than I can throw them.

I'm curious, how can they inject their data if https is used?

> we implement network management, which is significantly different than blanket throttling [Verizon spokesperson]

Correct. It's selective throttling.

And I’m perfectly okay with that for wireless carriers. Unlike wired based data transport, you can’t just throw money at infrastructure and get more bandwidth. There is a known limit to how much data you can carry over a certain frequency and only certain frequencies are good for data.

Bad news for Australia, where people switch to their phone data when they need serious bandwidth because it's faster than our wired infrastructure.

In the grand scheme of things, neither is our wired infrastructure in the US. Upload speeds are usually abysmal.

Comcast’s gigabit plan costs over $100 has 35Mbps upload speed and still I believe has a data cap.

But I don’t even bother getting on WiFi when I go somewhere. My cellular data is usually more reliable.

> you can’t just throw money at infrastructure and get more bandwidth

Can't you? You can always just keep decreasing the size of the individual cells in the network, right? Surely we aren't hitting any strict limitations in that respect yet, are we?

Of course you can do that. But each individual cell in an area raises the noise floor of that chunk of spectrum. And Shannon Information theory then has some pretty harsh things to say about that.

Outside of conventions that's a rather meaningless limitation. We could easily have 20x as many cell towers in the US without issue.

Which doesn’t help depending on how congested the area it’s tryinb to cover.

The biggest hurdle to getting more towers though is not the carrier, it’s city regulations.

Smaller cells use less intrusive antennae, often not even mounted on towers. The really big towers are for big cells like those covering rural interstates. No one complains about those towers.

I also agree, under certain conditions. The main ones being that this has to be disclosed front and center when agreeing to sign the contract mentioning the relative priorities that different types of traffic will receive (ex: voice - high, video streaming - medium, web browsing - low) and it should differentiate exclusively based on traffic type, not particular sources (like throttling one streaming service but not another). It should also flag when this is happening and with which type of traffic so a user can clearly determine if the service is fit for use.

Limiting bandwidth based on who pays more is just a new source of revenue disguised as network or congestion management.

Now imagine you're driving down the road and some road authority does congestion management by pulling cars over based on how much money they threw at the toll barrier or by how much their car manufacturer is contributing to the respective authority each year. After all the road has a fixed capacity and almost 0 chances of increasing it.

Any internet throttling rule that can be circumvented by paying for "priority" should be illegal.

Except we are far away from these limits and instead have carriers aggressively throttling video (which then falls back to lower res) simply to obscure lacking infrastructure and investment.

>which then falls back to lower res

Another reason to adopt AV1 as soon as possible.

Having neutralized net neutrality, throttling a.k.a network decongestion, would become common. And as predicted, these two companies have the financial power to make deals and the smaller guys would get screwed.

Imagine Skype / whatsapp startups - telecom income threats being introduced today.

Throttling has existed long before net neutrality. Just about any public wifi service, for example, will throttle video streaming to unusable levels.

And why would YouTube and Netflix pay ISPs for better treatment? That would create an escalating fee scenario that would become unaffordable.

> That would create an escalating fee scenario that would become unaffordable.

Never underestimate the power of capitalist greed. See also: education and healthcare costs.

Net neutrality was not stopping this behavior, which has been happening for years * . How quickly do we forget things like the widely publicized NetFlix + Comcast arrangement... Anyhow, in that monstrosity of a net neutrality bill every single rule was qualified with a "Thou shall not [...] except for reasonable network management." ISPs were completely free to throttle so long as they could do so under the pretext of reasonable network management. You'll note that even lacking clear rules, they're still using the same sort of language:

“We do not automatically throttle any customers,” said Rich Young, a Verizon spokesman. “To manage traffic on our network, we implement network management, which is significantly different than blanket throttling.”

---

* = granted, in the past years we only had a legally sustained net neutrality for an extremely small window of time, but most people do not realize this and think that we've had net neutrality for years and things only recently changed.

Can't the FCC make some objective measurements and penalize the offending ISPs?

Can they? Certainly. Will they? Not under Pai.

Net neutrality is a principle which is there with or without The Open Internet Order and was there since the beginning of the Internet. How and when the principle of net neutrality is enforced is another matter.

I used to experience this in the UK with Virgin Media. Youtube would be unwatchable and any downloads from the Google Play Store would timeout 80% of the time. Switched my devices over to a VPN and the issue went away immediately. They deny it but thats pretty damning evidence af far as I'm concerned.

Hmm, I never experienced that. I just experience their crappy wifi.

Which could be an issue with the router, device hardware, or even ChromeCast. Anecdotally Youtube seems to interact weirdly sometimes and trigger bugs in other devices.

Unlikely, could also just mean congested upstream routes/bad routing somewhere. Your VPN means traffic takes a different route that isn't affected.

I'm 99% sure VM don't do any throttling (on downstream at least).

I had the same problem for quite a while and was told it was a peering issue.

So while they were not throttling, they somehow messed something up elsewhere and for months my VPN was significantly faster than an un-VPN'ed connection for some bizarre reason.

Proof: https://imgur.com/a/JflXR

Same thing. Connection speed using VPN suddenly doubled and tripled, depending on the time of day.

The problem went away after a few months. Very bizarre though, and of course no transparency from Virgin on this.

This is because YouTube has servers on Virgin Media's network. In theory that's good, and it is most of the time. But when those servers get overloaded, it doesn't fall back to using the regular YouTube servers.

Weird, I have Virgin Fibre and have never had any issues with throttling, even when torrenting etc.

>'"John Donovan, head of AT&T’s satellite, phone and internet operations, said "unequivocally we are not selectively throttling by what property it is. We don’t look at any traffic differently than any other traffic."

He compared AT&T throttling to an electricity grid where some customers sign up for rolling blackouts in return for cheaper service. That’s what Choffnes’s research is detecting, the AT&T executive said."'

Except that nobody would ever sign up for a cheaper electrical service in exchange for rolling blackouts.

It's also an interesting choice for a metaphor given that power companies are regulated utilities that would never be allowed to offer this as a result of that regulation. Lastly AT&T service is not cheap to to begin with.

I think this statement really crystalizes the absurdity of these carriers and the buffoons running them.

Remember the FCC's reasoning for rolling back Net Neutrality were "paving the way for better, faster and cheaper Internet access for consumers."[1]

Exactly zero of those objectives are being achieved by throttling consumer's bandwidth.

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/restoring-internet-freedom

> Except that nobody would ever sign up for a cheaper electrical service in exchange for rolling blackouts.

My power company does excatly that: https://www.fpl.com/save/programs/on-call.html

Yes, the idea of ceding to the power company (in exchange for a credit / rate reduction) the ability to turn off your power in whole or part is well known and is called "Demand Response"

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

No, that is not the same thing at all. Not even close.

A rolling black out is an involuntary action. It is also an action that results in total loss of power, hence the term "blackout."

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

> would never be allowed to offer this as a result of that regulation

Sure they would, I can sign up to stick a device between my wall and my major appliances where the power company will shut me off during peak hours in exchange for a cheaper bill. Why wouldn't this be allowed? It's hard to argue that such a system is anything but beneficial to everyone involved.

> Lastly AT&T service is not cheap to to begin with.

ISPs, along with a lot of businesses really, don't really compete on price. The industry has long since figured out how much value customers get from their service and wouldn't dare undercut or risk accidentally killing the cash cow.

Seems like it is time to separate the bundling of telecoms. No one that provides internet should be able to provide other services that would be a conflict of interest and promote an incentive of bad business practices such as throttling.

What is the downside for Television companies to be restricted from expanding into separate services in the same space while providing internet and vice versa?

> If you want high-definition video, you can pay more, the carriers say.

Yep. This is what people warned about.

https://i.huffpost.com/gen/1567010/original.jpg

Might be useful to add "mobile" before "carriers" in the title. It's still bad, but not as bad as if wired ISPs were doing it, since mobile carriers (usually) tell the customers that they throttle, and under what circumstances.

Does anyone have a link to the actual research? I've looked around a bit for it, but all I can find are these general news stories. I want more technically detailed information.

This reflects the sad state of modern journalism. It costs nothing to link to the original study, which is online somewhere, in some format.

Nothing, that is, besides lost advert views and potential clicks.

>It costs nothing to link to the original study, which is online somewhere, in some format

a) You have no way of knowing whether the data beyond what is linked to in the article is available online. b) Finding it is not free if it requires the reporter's time. c) Bloomberg is hardly an example of the "sad state of modern journalism."

On b) if the reporter doesn't have the link, how the F is he writing the story? Is he just copying from somebody else's reporting?

https://dd.meddle.mobi/td_details.html

http://david.choffnes.com/pubs/imc095-molavi-kakhkiA.pdf

They need to publish their source code for me to believe their app.

I noticed with MetroPCS, when I download a Youtube video offline, it's very slow. However, if I turn on my Private Internet Access VPN, it's fast. This has been going on for at least two years; well before net neutrality was destroyed.

I'm no expert in this, but I feel that that's a relatively definitive proof that they're throttling it.

Wireless carriers had exemptions from Net Neutrality. The basis was that bandwidth was much more limited and they needed more flexibility to manage it.

Not where I live, net neutrality applies to T-mobile too. Throttling on purpose is illegal.

It is very hard to tell the difference between throttling and congestion with that kind of example.

Why is it hard to tell between throttling and congestion? Maybe my understanding is wrong but they are still sending the same amount of data. But when it's encrypted traffic from the VPN the ISP can't sniff and throttle.

throttling and congestion both drop packets in a TCP stream, which signals the sender to slow down it's sending rate. congestion means that the packets are lost because they can't be pushed through a networking device (because the output port is busy and there isn't enough buffer, for example if the peering link between an ISP and a busy content provider is at maximum capacity); throttling means there is enough buffer, but the networking device is programmed with a policy to drop packets from certain streams (for example, those with an IP address originating from a content provider)

A VPN circumvents congestion or throttling not by virtue of being encrypted but by having a different source IP or traversing a different route & different network ports/links from other packets going to the high bandwidth use content provider(s)

Data transmitted using a VPN goes through a different route that might not be congested.

The same amount of data, but not by the same route.

If at the peering point my ISP has two 1000mbps connections to Youtube and limits them both to 50% speed, that's "throttling". If they set one to full speed and unplug the other, that's "congestion".

From a customer's perspective, the symptoms - slow Youtube videos - are indistinguishable.

MetroPCS is T-Mobile under different branding. T-Mobile is fairly open about their throttling practices (you have to purchase their "ONE Plus" plan to have un-throttled video), but MetroPCS puts it in their rather long "Network Disclosure"[0]: "All current MetroPCS plans include video optimization features that are always enabled, which, when connected to the cellular network, deliver a DVD quality (typically 480p) video experience at up to 1.5 Mbps with minimal buffering while streaming ("Data Maximizer"). Customers may, for an additional charge, add on a native resolution video feature, disabling optimization for their device. Some qualifying video providers may choose to self-optimize their video content or opt-out of the Data Maximizer program."

[0]: https://www.metropcs.com/terms-conditions/network-disclosure...

> Customers may, for an additional charge, add on a native resolution video feature, disabling optimization

That's such beautiful double think. We have this amazing feature for you, and for just a small charge you may turn it off.

None of these articles ever talk about any concept of economic "distance". This one at least discusses the need for throttling if you read past the headline.

End consumers pay an set price for generic data at their ISPs corporate node, but data that comes from further nodes fundamentally costs more, as do large sources at peak times. Personally, I would rather the ISPs sort this out between themselves and other corporations rather than graduate my bill based on which sites/times I browse. The best would be a patchwork of municipal, regional, and private owned wired ISPs, private wireless carriers, and an open standard for peering agreements with concepts of "distance" and "congestion".

In response to the title of the article and ones like it: why is it surprising or "evil" that a company charging destinations a fixed price throttles at peak times or tries to be selective about data sources, even asking some over a certain threshold to reduce or foot part of the bill? It's OK to be suspicious of quasi public/private companies, but I need to see more evidence and more logic in news reporting to conclude people are acting immorally here. For example, outright blocking of content at the behest of politicians or differential throttling of data with equal "distance" outside of a common price structure.

YouTube makes the argument that they can ban unpopular, but legal speech because they're a private company, so why can't carriers throttle them because they are private companies?

The carriers are regulated monopolies, but Youtube is an unregulated monopoly. One is under the jurisdiction of the government, the other is free to ban whomever they want whenever they want.

YouTube isn't a monopoly, their competition is one click away.

ISP's are often regional monopolies or even if they're not, the switching costs are large and usually involve breaking a 2-year exclusivity agreement.

I do think that YouTube shouldn't be censoring content based on political views, but it's also not at all comparable to an ISP.

> YouTube isn't a monopoly, their competition is one click away.

The mere existence of competitors does not preclude one from having a monopoly.

By definition, it does "A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity" [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

Call them a de facto monopoly then.

Defending one anti-consumer shitty practice with another will not improve either of the situations. The end result is that you now live in a shitty situation where your company isn't providing you the service performance you bought.

Why on earth would you defend that?

Capitalism is one reason people have told me.

Then they bitch about their jobs going to a foreign country and really get offended when I use Capitalism back at them.

I still don't know.

I've thought it would be fun to try and sell a device with dual ethernet ports that people can plug in between their router and modem, which would constantly monitor their internet performance and give them a real time dashboard, in addition to reports. The goal being identifying how consistent your speed from your ISP is in general and detecting cases of throttling etc.

1. Display warning to the user that their ISP is throttling the traffic or doesn't provide enough bandwidth

2. Show them local alternative ISPs who don't have these problems

3. Take a signing bonus when users who had the warning displayed change ISPs

Just one idea of many, but content providers and users could put a lot more pressure on ISPs to prevent this, at least in areas where alternatives are available.

Because there are so many alternative ISPs to choose from and because there's so much money to be made by starting a new ISP.

Speak for yourself. There are plenty of alternatives where I am from (Europe) and running small, local ISPs works just fine.

The situation in the 'country of the free and awesome'© is supposedly different, but that doesn't invalidate my statement in any way.

With the amount of actual non "Original" content disappearing from streaming services, I've ramped up my BluRay plan to 3 Discs out at a time. It's the only way to watch 99% of movies anymore. This bullshit throttling makes an already poor streaming audio / video quality experience even worse.

One of the organization which I know had developed network monitoring tool to determine quality of experience for youtube videos by analyzing packets flowing over the network. The customers of the product were mostly carriers. So obviously they are watching and interested to know bandwidth usage for youtube.

On the T-Mobile side, were they leveraging the "Binge On Us" or similar setup? I have T-Mobile One w/ the international one plus or plus one (can't remember. The naming kind of stinks) add on and I've never noticed slow downs of any sort for video.

My Netflix seems like it gets randomly blurry almost every time I watch it now. (Using Google Fiber)

Imagine being a Twitch streamer whose livelihood is streaming to the website, and out of the blue, your ISP just starts throttling you.

What a nightmare; I've already seen streamers who had to consider moving because of continuous internet issues.

Then upgrade your residential internet service to a business plan, & deduct from taxes as business expense.

Thank you!!! It drives me insane that residential customers expect business grade service, service support, and uptime. Yet they want to pay a fraction of the price.

Then the ISPs will start requiring *Enterprise Premium", then they'll make you get "Enterprise Premium with Streaming package", then you'll have to get "Xfinity Triple Play Enterprise Premium with the Extended Streaming Bundle, up to 500 Subscribers Package". It's all bullshit for then to keep charging you more.

Thanks Net Neutrality.

Perhaps you meant, "thanks government-enforced monopoly"?

I think more realistically I think you mean, "thanks natural market effect where even among competing entities there's strong pressure to charge very close to customer's willingness to pay since undercutting your competition risks a race to the bottom where all competitors suffer."

Why aren't other markets like that? Lots of firms in lots of industries have single-digit margins over COGS. They're at "the bottom" all the time. In some industries, defectors from the commercial collusion you describe are punished through non-market means. In telecom, FCC prevents them from existing in the first place.

This has less to do with NN and more with that a business has a ridiculous amount of leverage over you. Once your ISP figured out that you were a streamer they could just up your price to $500/mo because they can.

Or more realistically they could just slip a line in their ToS saying that professional streaming requires a business plan which is $500/mo.

NN wouldn't have solved any of this.

lol. do you really think "Comcast Business" magically upgrades the lines or gateway hardware that serves your home? its just $200/month for slightly better reps, who still can't do jack about how the network drops your traffic.

Yes, unless they're installing a direct fiber line, which usually costs at least $1,000 a month with a 5 year contract plus possible installation costs for 100mb+ up/down, you're just getting the same crap everyone else is. And you have to dig around to find the right person to talk to, they don't even advertise it unless you're a decent size business.

Looks pretty un-hidden to me:

https://business.comcast.com/ethernet/metro-ethernet

Guess they updated their website! When I was looking, it just said some business internet website and you called and got transferred from person to person. And they never responded to submissions to the online form.

I do get different hardware at home. And when my modem dies at 2.30am on a Saturday night, as it has, I've had someone show up at 7am Sunday morning with the replacement.

I also get static IP addresses, inbound ports, and no throttling, BT or otherwise.

I mean this is pretty much business risk analysis. Other things that would shut down most streamers:

- Their ISP simply refusing to do business with them.

- Twitch banning them.

- YouTube banning them.

- PayPal banning them.

- Their ISP changing their terms of service to classify professional streaming as business activity and not allowed on their network without a business plan.

- Their city deciding that since your building is zoned for residential only that they have to stream somewhere else.

- The publishers of the games they play submitting DMCA takedowns on their content.

This in no way justifies malicious actions by ISPs but the argument "you can't throttle people's internet, their livelihoods might depend on it" would in practice be met by "well those people shouldn't try to run a business on a consumer internet plan without accepting the risks."

But this is not a Net Neutrality issue. It's my understanding that NN only applies to wired carriers. Wireless was exempted from NN.

> But this is not a Net Neutrality issue.

Yes, it is.

> It's my understanding that NN only applies to wired carriers. Wireless was exempted from NN.

Your understanding is wrong on several levels:

(1) Net neutrality is a common name for a set of principles that predate (even as an official guiding philosophy at the FCC, though the FCC consistently used “Open Internet” instead of “net neutrality” as the name) the 2010 and 2015 Open Internet orders, and as such apply equally to all carriers.

(2) The distinction made in the 2010 and 2015 orders was between mobile and fixed carriers, not wireline and wireless.

(3) While much weaker rules were applied to mobile carriers in the 2010 order, that wasn't true in the 2015 order, and in any case both orders applied to both fixed and mobile carriers.

Although Net Neutrality under the Obama admin only narrowly applied to wireless carries, one of the things that applied was discriminatory blocking/slowing downs of specific content (if I remember correctly).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com