Mobile Binge On throttling streams and video downloads, EFF report shows

Jan 06, 2016, 00:06

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. Furthermore, there's no actual "optimization" taking place at all. "If the video is more than 480p and the server sending the video doesn't have a way to reduce or adapt the bitrate of the video as it's being streamed, the result is stuttering and uneven streaming - exactly the opposite of the experience T-Mobile claims their "optimization" will have".

In its testing, the EFF found that T-Mobile throttled all video streams to a speed of approximately 1.5Mbps, regardless of the connection that the phone had and what video was being played.

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When it rolled out the service, T-Mobile promised customers could freely stream video from HBO, Hulu, Netflix, Showtime, Sling TV, STARZ, WatchESPN and other cable providers to which they subscribed. T-Mobile has argued that Binge On and its audio streaming service Music Freedom don't violate network neutrality, because the services don't charge partners to participate in the programs, and any legal service can join.

It seems, however, that T-Mobile has been downgrading "all video traffic, across all data plans, regardless of network congestion", according to the Internet Association, rather than just partner services. Even the term "downgrading" is inaccurate, because that would mean video streams are simply being given a lower priority than other traffic. Yet now, an EFF investigation into the service appears to disagree with T-Mobile's comment.

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Google has been complaining about T-Mobile's apparent practice since last month, when company representatives told The Wall Street Journal that T-Mobile was throttling YouTube. "We posted a video on one of our servers and tried accessing it via a T-Mobile LTE connection using various methods and under various conditions", said Jeremy Gillula, a staff technologist at EFF, in a statement. The bottom line, according to the organization, is that "T-Mobile's "optimization" consists entirely of throttling the video stream's throughput down to 1.5Mbps". The Federal Communications Commission is set to meet T-Mobile and other service providers next week to discuss the matter. The tests included streaming an HTML5 video using the web browser, downloading a video, downloading a video file without a video extension, and downloading a file that was not a video. "It will be interesting to see how T-Mobile explains and deals with this".

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