If that were true, then in the absence of higher priority traffic, videos should stream at the same throughput as any other content. But that’s not the case: our tests show that video streams are capped at around 1.5 Mbps, even when the LTE connection and the reset of T-Mobile’s network can support higher throughput between the customer and the server. Following complaints from users and online video providers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has examined the company’s Binge On feature, which lets users watch video content from select T-Mobile partners without dinging their data cap, and revealed that the wireless carrier is throttling all HTML5 video content for users with Binge On enabled, regardless of the video provider’s participation in the program.
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Binge On by T-Mobile is a throttling strategy that affects all video apps, according to an investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Do you enjoy the service or have you disabled it?
Jeremy Gillula, the staff technologist at the EFF who wrote the report, said the group wouldn’t object to the program if T-Mobile made it clear that all video was being throttled and if customers could “opt in” rather than have it automatically turned it on by the carrier.
It would seem that T-Mobile’s saving grace at this point is the fact that customers can enable / disable Binge On at will. Whether or not customers are aware of this fact and the ramifications associated with it being disabled (all video being throttled) could ultimately decide its fate with regulators. What the EFF found, however, is that T-Mobile doesn’t actually perform any sort of optimization at all.
Yet now, an EFF investigation into the service appears to disagree with T-Mobile’s comment. For one, YouTube complained that the company is downgrading video streaming quality. The service simply chokes video bandwidth down to roughly 1.5MB/s, and relies on the video platform to determine that it should lower quality to maintain an adequate frame rate. T-Mo confirmed that it can also determine if a file is a video even if there’s no video file extension.
The telecom enterprise throttles HTML5 video even when the file name or HTTP Content-Type headers do not indicate that the file is a video, which according to experts means that they are actually examining each subscriber’s data packets to look for videos to throttle. T-Mobile has taken heat from net neutrality advocates (and YouTube) for meddling with Internet content and setting a bad precedent, even if customers may be excited by the lure of “free stuff”.
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“It also accuses the telecom giant of violating the Open Internet Order created by the FCC, which says that IPS “…shall not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of Internet content, application, or service…subject to reasonable network management”.
