T-Mobile offers one-week network test drive, free music streaming | Hacker News Reader

T-Mobile offers one-week network test drive, free music streaming

reuters.com

34 pointsarms7744 comments

This is exactly what the end of net neutrality looks like.

Certain "approved" services won't count towards your data plan, whereas all the others will be limited. As a result, it will be nearly impossible for startups to break into new markets, because they not only have to face the challenge of acquiring new users, but their services will be inherently inferior (from the user's perspective), as they will count towards their data caps. There will be less innovation, and more stagnation as incumbents face less and less competition: http://avc.com/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-two/

Notice how not all streaming services are covered - only the ones that T-Mobile has approved here.

> Notice how not all music streaming services are covered - only the ones that T-Mobile has approved here

They give instructions on their site for legal steaming music services to request to be added, and have said they want to cover them all.

But it still is only for "music streaming", not for any other bits I might want to use on my mobile device (augmented reality, maps, video, games....)

I don't understand your complaint. Is it that not everything you might possibly want to download or stream is covered? Are you looking at this not as an added bonus, but less than you expected when you initially signed up with T-Mobile? As I understand it, you can use whatever you want on your phone and that hasn't changed one lick since the announcement.

I was really split on the issue. On one side it's a good thing, and a really cool thing for the t-mobile customers. However, this is a bad thing for progress. Here is why:

1. Music is a pusher, it get's people to buy bigger data plans, it gets companies to provide bigger data plans. No that music is unlimited on T-Mobile, it's less likely that we are going to see cheeper data plans. Instead, it's just going to be unlimited music, and same old data plan for everything else.

2. Forget about discriminating one company over another. What about discriminating one type of content over another. What makes music better then spoken word podcasts, or online video, or netflix. You have to remember, nothing in this life is free. By promoting music content, t-mobile is necessarily demoting other types of content.

Worse, only for approved music streaming.

Let's say I'm a mobile-focused music streaming startup. How will I convince people to switch to me when Spotify lets them stream without it counting against their data cap but my service can't offer that. T-Mobile hasn't added support for Google Play or Xbox Music or last.fm or Rdio. I think it will be a very (very) long time before extend it to the scrappy startups.

It's effectively a gift to incumbent streaming services and a barrier to entry for newcomers.

> This is exactly what the end of net neutrality looks like.

What "end of net neutrality?" There was never a point in time where this would have been disallowed.

As a T-Mobile customer, I think this is fantastic. There are a lot of potential advantages to vertical integration of the network and the content provider. Imagine caching Spotify data right at the cell site to minimize the impact on the backhaul, or offering reduced data charges for Netflix in situations where T-Mobile can take advantage of LTE MBSFN.

Moreover, the usual justifications for regulation aren't applicable here. T-Mobile has three major competitors in every one of its markets, and more than that in some. They bought the spectrum with private capital, and built the network with private capital. They don't owe it to startups to make their VC pitches easier.

The courts have taken a dim view of "bundling" in the past -- leveraging an incumbency in one product area to anti-competitively subsidize another area.

Sure, I have 4 cell phone networks to choose from. But how many cellphone+music networks? That is where anticompetitiveness appears.

As a Pandora user, I am not excited by T-Mobile investing its resources in Spotify.

And edge caching already exists, it doesn't need to be discriminatory.

Finally, this isn't even about edge caching or backhaul, it is about reserving radio bandwidth for preferred partners.

Leveraging one line of business to subsidize another is only anti-competitive if you're a monopoly in the first line of business. But T-Mobile isn't a monopoly in cellular service.

> But T-Mobile isn't a monopoly in cellular service.

They do however control access to services that their subscribers use. To give their preferred services priority and/or different rates over those offered by competitors or others is something that goes against common carrier principles which seem to imply (to me at least, maybe that's wrong) that there are minimum performance guarantees. T-Mobile currently enjoys common carrier status and as such should attempt to emulate a dumb pipe as much as possible lest they get the regulatory eye of Sauron pointed in their direction.

I highly doubt they will risk that just for laughs, so likely this is simply a pilot of sorts.

What if the music service simply pays for the bandwidth rather than the end user?

That isn't necessarily true...

If you add the conditional, "and other businesses in that vertical don't subsidize in the same manner"; than yeah, that's closer to a true statement, although still not entirely so.

You seem to be arguing against net neutrality in general.

Set aside the law... isn't it self-evidently a bad idea to have your ISP picking winners and losers from among the internet services you can use?

Unless they get kickbacks from Pandora et al, it isn't bundling.

When IE was bundled with Windows- Microsoft owned both products.

> As a Pandora user, I am not excited by T-Mobile investing its resources in Spotify

Pandora is part of T-Mobile's free music streaming program.

All sorts of bundling are perfectly fine. On my morning drive I heard an ad for an insurance company offering discounts for, literally, "bundling home and auto insurance." Their words. (And it made me think about which kinds of bundling are and are not allowed, so I was a bit primed for this comment.)

It's not fair to me that they charge me a premium to choose other music services. I already have a music service I like. I don't buy any technical mumbo-jumbo answers about server co-location. I know Google can co-locate anywhere they want but that's not Tmobile's business plan.

Fair? It's a business partnership. Is it also not fair when Pixar toys get bundled into Happy Meals?

As already pointed out - both music streaming and mobile communications are highly competitive, so there's need for government regulation here.

Corporations always end up holding the leash of the government bodies that were meant to regulate them. There are perhaps valid reasons to consider network neutrality legislation, but this is not one of them.

That is a terrible analogy. It's more like your electrical provider not charging you if you use a specific type of television.

As you allude, it is kind of ironic your parent argues how T-Mobile is making life harder for startups, when T-Mobile is themselves an underdog. In forbidding them from doing such a thing, we make life harder for them...

Would you mind explaining your point? T-Mobile is a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. While they may be an underdog in the US mobile industry, it's a very far cry from a guy in his garage with some business idea.

In terms of what they have at their disposal, it's more like a relatively unknown channel in the UK owned by Turner Broadcasting or News Corporation.

T-Mobile US does not operate as a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. It's a separate, publicly-traded company. DT owns 72% of it post-MetroPCS merger, but operates separately under the same brand.

I think you should keep in mind this site is visited largely by people starting their own business, most of the time, on the internet.

So what does this mean to them then?

That its fading, its going from being able to serve people all around the world and build and challenge the companies at the top with your new and revolutionary idea (and get very very rich) that would be ditched by the big companies corporate branch (do you imagine what cable companies would've said if someone from the inside tried to build a netflix at first?, or what was the reason that didn't happen before since they had rights to the content already?).

And that that's it, there's a new better X service? oh but it isn't free on my carrier, I guess I'll stick with Y.

So who should control the Internet?

im sorry, i dont think i have the answer to that? Depends who you ask. But the point of my reply was to try to show why the people here claiming it isnt fair is saying that.

If you ask me i dont think anyone should have full control of the internet.

Sure, but this site also has a lot of people who decry industries who lobby for government regulation in their own self-interest. When it comes to wireline ISP's, net neutrality proponents can justify regulation on the basis of local monopolies, etc. But in the U.S., over 200 million people have at least three options for 4G LTE service. And Sprint already covers 35 million people with LTE and is growing its footprint. You also have regional carriers like U.S. Cellular who have deployed LTE. And you have T-Mobile as the underdog player engaging in a real price/service war with the bigger competitors. Calling for regulation here is just calling for rules that favor one industry over another.

And it's not just cellular companies that are hurt by such regulation. I used to work at a startup developing wireless technology. If you legislate cellular wireless into a low-margin, "dumb pipe" business, then those companies will have less money/incentive for R&D, and you'll end up hurt companies like ours.

And by banning bundling, you're eliminating the opportunities for real innovation in the sector. One of the ripest opportunities in the music/movie streaming sector is figuring out how to deploy it in mobile networks in a bandwidth-effective way. Bandwidth, especially mobile bandwidth, doesn't rain down like mana from heaven. Someone has to build the cell towers, someone has to lay the fiber for the backhaul. What if your startup idea involves helping cellular wireless companies distribute media content more efficiently using their existing infrastructure? Your interpretation of net neutrality forecloses on those opportunities.

>> Notice how not all music streaming services are covered - only the ones that T-Mobile has approved here.

"During the announcement, T-Mobile’s John Legere assured the audience that their initial picks for streaming services wasn’t any sort of competitive/business move. Rather, it was a matter of technical implementation. They’ve got to manually configure the network to whitelist each service’s myriad data sources, so they picked just eight to start. The goal, Legere says, is to include “every music streaming service” in the program; moving forward, they’ll invite customers to vote on which services get added next."

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/t-mobile-stops-counting-dat...

That's probably true and I have no reason to believe T-Mobile is acting in bad faith, but that's not good enough.

This is a bad idea. Unless you can offer the same service to every streaming audio service (even little startups) then it ain't neutral. T-Mobile currently has a poll on their Facebook page for which streaming services to add next. How is a new startup supposed to get on that list when it's competing in a poll with Google, Microsoft, last.fm, etc.

I would prefer that my ISP not give special treatment to packets from one company over another. Just deliver the bytes I paid for, thanks.

It's never perfectly neutral & accessible to companies of any size.

How is it fair when you have to pay money to develop apps for iOS? That's not equal-opportunity!

Answer: you're right, it isn't.

I think I phrased that poorly. I'm not asking that they make it perfect, I'm saying it's just a plain bad idea. It would be impractical to implement in a fair way. So it has the (likely unintended) effect of reducing competition. It's a bad idea.

The world is not fair and this makes one tiny piece of it even less so.

But what if it makes T-Mobile more competitive, thus making the wireless carrier industry more fair? Could we see a net increase in total fairness?

So unless the solution is absolutely perfect you'd prefer no solution at all?

Streaming music is the single biggest use of bandwidth on my phone right now (T-Mobile, as it happens). This change gives me one less reason to care about my bandwidth usage. If they don't whitelist the particular service I use yet, that's not going to make me stop streaming music or force me to buy a more expensive plan, because T-Mobile doesn't cut you off when you reach your cap in the first place.

Solution to what? Data caps being too low?

I think this is a perfectly reasonable implementation of a bad idea. It's good for the T-Mobile customer today, bad for everyone in the long run.

And which is it? Either you care that your streaming app is whitelisted or you don't. Since it's the single biggest usage of data on your phone (same for me, btw) I'd guess you probably care. If I had a 1GB cap on my data service, you'd have a very hard time convincing me to switch from a favored streaming service to a non-favored one.

But if they theoretically could get every sound broadcaster now matter how small, then you would support them taking a stance that music is more valuable than other forms of data? Is that neutral?

Not really. I'd definitely prefer they treat all bits equally for all services. But it's much easier to see the potential harm from picking winners and losers among a set of direct competitors than between apps in different categories.

In commieland all data streams of any kind are inherently valuable to each and every man on earth regardless the point of origin or destination. In the real world certain data streams are of higher value to certain people based on their route and content.

> This is exactly what the end of net neutrality looks like

Probably yeah. We can party thank the ignorant mob mentality of the Internet for it. Over the last year or so we've heard nothing but gloom and doom about how terrible the end of net neutrality would be but hey free unlimited streaming music? That sounds nice. Why didn't pro-regulation folks mention that part? It's almost like they were intentionally misleading people to further their best interests? Maybe exactly like those ISPs who realized it was in their best interest to break into a new market of companies with multi-million/billion dollar profits who are willing to pay-to-play?

> nearly impossible for startups to break into new markets

What's the point in pretending these startups don't have the exact same motivations as ISPs or even other services who opt to pay for the 'fast lane' to improve their service? Everyone is out to maximize their own profits and since the ole' economic ladder has a few broken rungs we know the average consumer isn't going to magically have more money to spend anytime soon. This has always simply been a debate over who gets to take the money.

> only the ones that T-Mobile has approved here.

If it's all doom and gloom then surely it will create a great opportunity for new players to jump into the ISP market and provide 100% cap free / 100% net neutral / 100% SLA 24x7 guaranteed speeds to consumers. If the issue is as one-sided as we have been led to believe then perhaps companies like FaceBook wouldn't be prioritizing their billions on WhatsApp or maybe Apple wouldn't be spending billions on Dr. Dre? Maybe instead they would be investing money into jumping into the ISP market? If the top 5 major tech companies in the US banded together and invested even 10% of their revenue in the ISP market this would be a non-issue. So why don't they? Turns out they can make more money buying Dr. Dre and their motivations are exactly the same. Money... Good.

For those doting on net neutrality - this is purely the 'answer' from a Cable companies perspective. People don't need cable now. So what do you do? Buy an ISP, match up with existing partners to offer deals. It's already happened here in New Zealand. Telecom have partnered with Spotify, Vodafone has just bought a bunch of smaller ISP's. Sky, originally our version of "cable"/satellite has now bought out a lot of the bigger ISP's and is using it's network to push content via streaming services at a premium.

The funny thing is, Telecom own pretty much all of our lines. (Govt sold them in the 80's.)

The plot thickens..

I dunno. Preferential zero-rating of a specific service, whether it's Facebook or Spotify, is precisely the antithesis of net neutrality.

When I think of net neutrality, I think about what happened to ISPs in Canada -- bandwidth caps (albeit large ones, after many years of squabbling) and per-GB overage fees. But, while I'd rather that the ISP charge me a reasonable tariff for additional data usage than throttle me during peak hours for a fixed price, I can see that not everyone would like it that way.

Picking winners and losers in the music streaming business:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140619/06354227623/when-...

Great marketing move. Consider how much more press/mileage T-Mo gets for this, versus raising data caps by an equivalent amount (E.g. back in March when they bumped caps up by 0.5GB/mo on most of their plans [1].)

[1] http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=13758

Where the heck is this list...

Thank you for telling me the content of the spam email I received today.

This is a bit gimmicky. They should build market share through earned reputation.

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