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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

Mobile providers are a different beast because there’s a limit on radio spectrum. Throttling is necessary.

But throttling only the competition is not.

No, it's not. Cutting back each user's allotment temporarily during times of congestion is necessary, but otherwise there's no technical reason to throttle, let alone choose one particular kind of app.

If radio spectrum is so scarce, how are Mobile and Verizon selling unlimited 5g home internet service?

Additionally, 5G is closer to wifi than anything else. They're putting a lot more access points with shorter range around closer to homes. And it does become congested during high traffic times.

That's an ideal example of the limitation. A single tower with a wide range can't handle the same volume of devices in the area. So by using 5G it's just closer and closer to home, with fewer people using it at each point.

No question that it solves the last mile problem for these companies though. It's a lot easier to run fiber to an access point at the edge of your neighborhood than it is to run it to every house in that neighborhood.

I think a lot of those home 5G services are using the higher frequency 5G bands, which are often not great for portable devices.

Eh, I'd argue it's still a business decision. It's still possible to find "true unlimited" data plans with some companies. I've got one with Cricket Wireless.

They do mess with your data connection though[0]. For instance, they automatically downgrade video and appear to compress images "on your behalf"[0] regardless of what plan you're on.

I'm somewhat dubious on the idea that their Cricket More plan is actually unlimited, but I'm pressed for time and can't read their more dense terms of service around the plan, but I'm assuming they have a congestion clause buried in there, despite what the linked FAQ claims

[0]: https://www.cricketwireless.com/legal-info/mobile-broadband-...

I know how they do that with video, but how do they extra compress images when most traffic is https?

It works with video because all video sites automatically adjust quality based on throughput so they just figure out when you’re streaming video and then throttle. But most websites don’t automatically change image quality based on throughput and pages load more quickly and are harder to shape…

No idea, however from the linked page, they say they do:

>Cricket compresses all images that are embedded in web pages in either of two industry standard formats (JPEG and GIF), regardless of the source or content of the web page or the application used to view it. Cricket strives to compress web page images to provide a high quality user experience where the average consumer should not notice a difference between the source image and the compressed image.

The only way is if there’s some cooperation between the site and ISP where the site knows to apply extra compression for the ISPs address range. Otherwise I don’t see how that could work (and also trivially bypassed when on VPN or even something like Apple Private Relay although the latter may still tunnel through some kind of mobile ISP info - not sure)

All mobile networks throttle in terms of different people’s data having different levels of priority.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/tn4733/qci_leve...

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

It's unlimited but throttled during peak usage so that the primary network customers get priority. I think cricket wireless is an MNVO, see the drawbacks of an MNVO here:

https://utilitiesone.com/comparing-mobile-virtual-network-op...

Those still throttle after a soft cap.

Let's take the null hypothesis that these incentives push all video streaming to Apple+. The total bandwidth hasn't changed, all that's happened is that is it's only streamed over Apple+ now. How does this help with their spectrum constraints?

T-Mobile USA has a pretty user friendly version of this on many/most of its plans.

If a music streaming service participates to label its traffic, that data is zero rated for eligible users.

If a video streaming service participates to label its traffic and limit bandwidth (advertising says 480p, but I think it's really a bitrate cap), then data is zero rated for eligible users. On plans with a high speed data cap, users can opt out of the bandwidth limiting and get potentially higher quality streaming (depending on network conditions) but the data usage will be charged against the cap.

There's no charge for providers to participate.

I don't know how zero-rating music streaming helps with spectrum; that's probably more of an inducement to use data, but music streaming is low bandwidth, and maybe there's some magic to accumulate those packets and send as a batch rather than one at a time and therefore save some framing bandwidth.

For video it's clearly a bandwidth thing. If you can reduce to the target, that's good for their spectrum management, so you get a carrot. Also, it encourages bandwidth sensitive streaming (which many services were already doing), so that if the conditions are poor for a particular user/cell, video bandwidth will be responsive and reduce automatically.

So are you trying to sell the ability to graph who has seen what? Because that's essentially what that scheme does. No more dumb pipes, you're handing over tons of business recod based metadata out to ISP's to inevitably monetize, which, oh, coincidentally, waives any expectation of privacy legally speaking between the endpoints given our current judicial attitude toward Third Party Doctrine.

No. While it's certainly easiest to identify video streaming if the content is served in the clear, it's also possible to mark streams as video without making the content (or its identifiers) available. If everything is limited to 1.5 Mbps, you're just letting the carrier know who is watching something; but it's not hard to guess that someone is watching something based on the origin of traffic and other signs: if you download a short burst of data from Netflix CDN, you're probably running the fast.com speed test; if it's about 40 minutes of sustained data transfer, you probably watched a TV episode, if it's more like 2 hours, it was likely a movie, etc.

There's a benefit to the video providers, the carrier, and users, if this is done in a reasonable way. And I think T-Mobile's approach is the most reasonable way I've seen (at least from what's been said publicly)

So how do I sign up to get my home media server added to be zero-rated?

T-mobile says:

"If you are a streaming service provider click here[1], send us an email and we'll get back to you to begin the process. T-Mobile will review all submissions to ensure identification of video stream and technical requirements, including optimization for mobile viewing."

They do have a requirement that "Only lawful and licensed video content is eligible for the offering" And that you be capable of making the stream identifiable as video content and do adaptive bitrate streaming (target of 1.5 Mbps)

The only public documentation for service providers I found was in the consumer faq [2] under "I’m a streaming service provider – how do I learn more?"

It's quite probable that they won't engage with a home media server, because you're operating under fair use rather than an explicit license, or because there's too many individual home media servers and some home media servers serve media that's unlicensed and also not within the scope of fair user. But it doesn't hurt to ask and see what you get back.

Alternately, a paper from 2016 [3], suggests you could make your content available in a form that appears to be one of the supported services, and likely get mischaracterized as that service and have your data zero-rated as a result. Not sure if anyone is still running video over http in 2016, but it's worth a try. It should be apparent if it works, as when it does, T-Mobile will limit streaming bandwidth to 1.5 Mbps.

[1] bingeon@t-mobile.com

[2] https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/binge-on

[3] http://david.choffnes.com/pubs/bingeon_sigcomm16.pdf

Do you think that /all/ streaming would be pushed to Apple+? What if some people simply reduced the amount they streamed over the cell link?

Hello, Finland here. I have a true unlimited phone plan. Unlimited texts, unlimited calls, 200Mbit/s of bandwidth with unlimited data. 27€ per month. Yes, the bandwidth is capped, but getting 200 megs is possible most of the time, it's really more of an exception to not get the full speed. Sometimes some cells can become congested, but that's really rare.

There are about 70 cities in the world with a larger population than the whole of country of Finland - so maybe there is a representativeness challenge in this comparison.

That means it actually cost more to build the infrastructure per capita.

Yeah, but generally network costs grow with n^2 the number of users.

What do you mean by network costs?

Fewer cell towers per user is surely cheaper assuming each user is consuming the same amount of content.

Error correction, packet broadcasting per node, dynamic load rebalancing... the real world costs of any network increase proportional to the square of the nodes.

Then throttle everyone equally. Don't throttle your competitors while exempting your own subsidiaries, that is unfair.

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