Binge On! - And So This is Net Neutrality?

William Herrin bill at herrin.us
Fri Dec 11 16:48:02 UTC 2015


On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 7:36 AM, Constantine A. Murenin
<mureninc at gmail.com> wrote:
> I disable VPN (which they limit to 128kbps as per above), and suddenly
> Netflix starts working just fine, since it now gets 1.5Mbps (or
> thereabouts), and 480p works just fine, even if you're tethered.  But
> yet my porn still doesn't work, even without a VPN!
>
> *** How is this not the very definition of fast vs. slow lanes, if one
> set of traffic gets a permanent 1,5Mbps high-speed treatment, whereas
> another set of traffic is limited to a slow 128kbps (or effectively
> 0kbps for video, since it won't stream at all) past the high-speed
> allocation? ***

Hi Constantine,

In the general case, because it's non-discriminatory. You had the same
speed either way until you hit your account cap and if you pay for
more bandwidth you'll have the same speed to both once again.
Moreover, anyone can pay for zero-rating.

In the T-Mobile binge-on case, it's probably a violation of net
neutrality. Unless I misunderstand, they're zero-rating folks based on
content and technology rather than payment. That's a no-no. They make
the case that they're not discriminating against one video provider or
another but they're discriminating against video providers versus
other less popular technologies whose cost of doing business is
effectively increased.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>



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