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T-Mobile started the slippery slope and legitimazed the idea of limited video with their "Binge On" program. If you turn on "Binge On", you only get down-sample

by gcr 10y ago

T-Mobile started the slippery slope and legitimazed the idea of limited video with their "Binge On" program. If you turn on "Binge On", you only get down-sampled, bandwidth-limited video. The trade-off was that they agreed not to charge you for watching downsampled video. They also let you turn this feature on or off, so there's an upside. But. There's a trick. T-mobile now offers a single plan, "T-Mobile ONE." All videos are downsampled by default and you can't disable that without paying extra. The customers' wallets have spoken.

izacus 10y ago
> The customers' wallets have spoken. Customer wallets are very silent in cases of natural monopoly like telecommunication services.
- woah 10y ago
  Why are telecommunication services a natural monopoly?
  - hiou 10y ago
    Ownership of the frequency bands. Maybe I was down voted because my comment was too brief. In the U.S. companies bid on and purchase wireless spectrum which they then own in perpetuity.
  - jjoonathan 10y ago
    The same reason as any other utility (gas, power, water). It's expensive to run so many redundant lines to your house (or cell towers, etc) as to make collusion between providers prohibitively difficult. Installed infrastructure serves as a moat; the minimum viable competing product requires a massive investment that can't be done one piece at a time, since your competitor will just undercut you wherever you start to roll out. On top of this you would have to deal with standard anticompetitive market forces like economies of scale and relative bargaining power. If you can't get a half decent price from your provider (on account of being small or on account of pressure exerted on the backbone provider by your competitor), you start at a disadvantage that might be impossible to make up. Investors can give you a jump start, but then you've got the problem of providing them a better return than the incumbent, which itself is pretty efficient at funneling money to its shareholders. Even if you don't trust the theoretical hand-waving, the fact that the market is the way it is should provide all the proof you need (see: Google Fiber). The "problem" with utility markets is so thoroughly established by precedent that Adam Smith himself used them in Wealth of Nations as an example of an economic sector where markets don't automagically "do the right thing." There are a number of policy approaches to solving the problem, some of which are more "hands on" than others, but it's not a problem that goes away on its own. It's still vulnerable to technological disruption though! Microwave/mm-wave internet service, which has tiny infrastructure requirements by comparison, might be our salvation if it can be made good enough. That's a difficult problem, but maybe not so difficult as trying to get ISPs regulated as utilities. Google is right to focus their efforts on it.
    - WorldMaker 10y ago
      With the respect to that last point, though, that's part of how in the 90s we've wound up in the (lack of) regulatory regime we're currently facing: at the time the regulations passed it looked like there might be enough competitor technologies for internet access that the technologies might effectively compete among themselves roughly enough to keep each other in check. Some of the competitor technologies didn't pan out (power line communications being a big one people talked about at the time, which never quite lead to broadband capabilities) and the rest of them were already "captured" to existing niches/hegemonies (the current big three: cable, phone line, cell tower) where providers were already well established due to predecessor technologies. We can keep hoping for a disruptive technology to wipe the slate clean and give us new players/niches, but infrastructure "disruption" on that sort of scale still tends to lend too much advantage to existing players in the infrastructure game: the natural place to add microwave beaming is between existing cell towers, the satellite internet providers too mostly get bought up by existing infrastructure companies like AT&T and Verizon to shore up portfolios and make FCC mandates that they at least pretend to offer broadband options in rural areas, etc. Beyond that, too, spectrum is finite and in spectrum auctions tends to favor existing players with war chests over disruptive newcomers. Outside of electromagnetic spectrum hopes, you are back to figuring out how to get physical wires from A to B and dealing with existing physical wire owners (the Google Fiber issues today). Something truly disruptive would be finding a way to do something crazy like IP over Quantum Teleportation and you can't exactly plan for when a breakthrough like that might (or might never) occur. All of which tl;dr is that technological disruption is more often than not a false hope we tend to use to avoid properly regulating today's technology (or more cynically: yesterday's ancient infrastructure fiefdoms) because it may need to compete with some future technology that never actually arrives.
chipperyman573 10y ago
Out of curiosity, if I subscribe to T-Mobile ONE (as close to "true" unlimited data we're going to get) and use a VPN, then video will stream in HD, without paying for the HD Pass (or whatever it's called), right?
shostack 10y ago
Ie boiling the frog. There are few better examples for why telecoms need to be regulated into dumb pipes.
dogma1138 10y ago
How can they override the video quality over HTTPS? even if they point you to their CDN can't you just DNS hack through this?
- mikeash 10y ago
  All they really need to do is throttle the connection, and the software will cut back on quality automatically.
- gcr 10y ago
  If a video hosting website wanted to join T-Mobile's "Binge On" program, they will agree to host their video in such a way that T-Mobile can detect which stream to throttle. This could mean serving it from certain hosts, serving videos over HTTP, or some other out-of-band pen-and-paper agreement between T-Mobile and the video website. See here for technical details for video hosting services: http://www.t-mobile.com/content/dam/tmo/en-g/pdf/BingeOn-Video-Technical-Criteria-March-2016.pdf http://www.t-mobile.com/content/dam/tmo/en-g/pdf/BingeOn-Vid... Lots of video providers went out of their way to jump on board. It had the support of many industry players because "Binge On", at the time, was a net positive for customers. Now that the infrastructure is in place, T-Mobile can drop the nice marketing.

by gcr 10y ago

izacus 10y ago

> The customers' wallets have spoken. Customer wallets are very silent in cases of natural monopoly like telecommunication services.

woah 10y ago
Why are telecommunication services a natural monopoly?
- hiou 10y ago
  Ownership of the frequency bands. Maybe I was down voted because my comment was too brief. In the U.S. companies bid on and purchase wireless spectrum which they then own in perpetuity.
- jjoonathan 10y ago
  The same reason as any other utility (gas, power, water). It's expensive to run so many redundant lines to your house (or cell towers, etc) as to make collusion between providers prohibitively difficult. Installed infrastructure serves as a moat; the minimum viable competing product requires a massive investment that can't be done one piece at a time, since your competitor will just undercut you wherever you start to roll out. On top of this you would have to deal with standard anticompetitive market forces like economies of scale and relative bargaining power. If you can't get a half decent price from your provider (on account of being small or on account of pressure exerted on the backbone provider by your competitor), you start at a disadvantage that might be impossible to make up. Investors can give you a jump start, but then you've got the problem of providing them a better return than the incumbent, which itself is pretty efficient at funneling money to its shareholders. Even if you don't trust the theoretical hand-waving, the fact that the market is the way it is should provide all the proof you need (see: Google Fiber). The "problem" with utility markets is so thoroughly established by precedent that Adam Smith himself used them in Wealth of Nations as an example of an economic sector where markets don't automagically "do the right thing." There are a number of policy approaches to solving the problem, some of which are more "hands on" than others, but it's not a problem that goes away on its own. It's still vulnerable to technological disruption though! Microwave/mm-wave internet service, which has tiny infrastructure requirements by comparison, might be our salvation if it can be made good enough. That's a difficult problem, but maybe not so difficult as trying to get ISPs regulated as utilities. Google is right to focus their efforts on it.
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    With the respect to that last point, though, that's part of how in the 90s we've wound up in the (lack of) regulatory regime we're currently facing: at the time the regulations passed it looked like there might be enough competitor technologies for internet access that the technologies might effectively compete among themselves roughly enough to keep each other in check. Some of the competitor technologies didn't pan out (power line communications being a big one people talked about at the time, which never quite lead to broadband capabilities) and the rest of them were already "captured" to existing niches/hegemonies (the current big three: cable, phone line, cell tower) where providers were already well established due to predecessor technologies. We can keep hoping for a disruptive technology to wipe the slate clean and give us new players/niches, but infrastructure "disruption" on that sort of scale still tends to lend too much advantage to existing players in the infrastructure game: the natural place to add microwave beaming is between existing cell towers, the satellite internet providers too mostly get bought up by existing infrastructure companies like AT&T and Verizon to shore up portfolios and make FCC mandates that they at least pretend to offer broadband options in rural areas, etc. Beyond that, too, spectrum is finite and in spectrum auctions tends to favor existing players with war chests over disruptive newcomers. Outside of electromagnetic spectrum hopes, you are back to figuring out how to get physical wires from A to B and dealing with existing physical wire owners (the Google Fiber issues today). Something truly disruptive would be finding a way to do something crazy like IP over Quantum Teleportation and you can't exactly plan for when a breakthrough like that might (or might never) occur. All of which tl;dr is that technological disruption is more often than not a false hope we tend to use to avoid properly regulating today's technology (or more cynically: yesterday's ancient infrastructure fiefdoms) because it may need to compete with some future technology that never actually arrives.

chipperyman573 10y ago

Out of curiosity, if I subscribe to T-Mobile ONE (as close to "true" unlimited data we're going to get) and use a VPN, then video will stream in HD, without paying for the HD Pass (or whatever it's called), right?

shostack 10y ago

Ie boiling the frog. There are few better examples for why telecoms need to be regulated into dumb pipes.

dogma1138 10y ago

How can they override the video quality over HTTPS? even if they point you to their CDN can't you just DNS hack through this?

mikeash 10y ago
All they really need to do is throttle the connection, and the software will cut back on quality automatically.
gcr 10y ago
If a video hosting website wanted to join T-Mobile's "Binge On" program, they will agree to host their video in such a way that T-Mobile can detect which stream to throttle. This could mean serving it from certain hosts, serving videos over HTTP, or some other out-of-band pen-and-paper agreement between T-Mobile and the video website. See here for technical details for video hosting services: http://www.t-mobile.com/content/dam/tmo/en-g/pdf/BingeOn-Video-Technical-Criteria-March-2016.pdf http://www.t-mobile.com/content/dam/tmo/en-g/pdf/BingeOn-Vid... Lots of video providers went out of their way to jump on board. It had the support of many industry players because "Binge On", at the time, was a net positive for customers. Now that the infrastructure is in place, T-Mobile can drop the nice marketing.