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T-Mobile got called out pretty hard when it was discovered they were downscaling videos [0] under the guise of their "Binge On" program. But hidden tracking coo
by chejazi 11y ago
T-Mobile got called out pretty hard when it was discovered they were downscaling videos [0] under the guise of their "Binge On" program. But hidden tracking cookies are far more disturbing that (noticeably) downscaled images/videos. Ultimately, the people are the consumers of images/videos. Who knows who the consumers of that tracking data might be... Obviously advertisers, but who else? The NSA?
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles-bingeon-optimization-just-throttling-applies https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles...
- spacemanmatt 11y agomy tmo network service is often a crude joke. 10gb/mo of basically trash service. at least i get 4 bars!
- pc86 11y agoI switched about 6 months ago and haven't had any problems at all. Anecdotes!
- sethhochberg 11y agoAre you in an area where T-Mobile offers band 12 LTE, and does your device's radio support it? http://www.spectrumgateway.com/t-mobile-700a-spectrum http://www.spectrumgateway.com/t-mobile-700a-spectrum Band 12 is rolling out pretty quickly and is spectrum that allegedly helps with a lot of issues caused by buildings / dense urban environments / long range / etc. I can't confirm personally since I don't own a device that supports LTE band 12 (purchased before TMo bought this spectrum....) but reports seem to be very positive.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- r00fus 11y agoAnecdotally, my TMO LTE service is better than my coworkers ATT or VZ in quite a few places.
- ikeboy 11y agoThat link says they reduced the download speed, but the actual files remained unchanged.
- criddell 11y agoI think they were relying on video services being able to detect available bandwidth and alter the stream to fit. Netflix does this, for example. If you have a narrow connection, you're probably going to get 240p video. If the streaming service doesn't do this, you just get a terrible experience (buffering... buffering... buffering...).
- mirimir 11y agoThat's why streaming on bad (narrow, high latency and/or jitter) connections is a bad idea, no? Download in the background, then view, makes much more sense.
- criddell 11y agoI don't think there's one right answer for that. Buffering is a terrible experience everywhere. On my desktop, I'd rather wait to get the best quality video that I can get. On mobile though, I probably prefer for video to start NOW at a lower bitrate if need be. It will save bandwidth, and battery, and time and the quality is probably good enough.
- mirimir 11y agoI'm not a mobile user, so this is probably unworkable. But anyway, why not download to desktop, and then transfer to mobile device? Destroys spontaneity, I know.
- criddell 11y ago> Destroys spontaneity It's exactly that. I'm sitting in a waiting room or the departure gate at the airport flipping through Twitter or Instagram and a click on a video. I don't need that 6 second video to play in 4K. That it runs instantly is the most important quality, IMHO.
- acdha 11y agoThat's a very different situation: they didn't downscale anything — the service used traffic shaping which caused most services to fall down to lower bitrates but they weren't altering content, which is why it still applied to HTTPS – and that wasn't a “discovery” as much as “reading the announcement”. The emails and SMS sent to all of their customers first and those messages included the opt-out link. In contrast, the super-cookies were only discovered by people noticing unexpected headers in the requests their servers were receiving. There was no pre-announcement and it took publicity to get opt-out instructions.