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A streaming video connection will also have a fairly characteristic bandwidth usage pattern. Tracking the requisite state is a bit tricky, but doable. This woul
by jerf 5y ago
A streaming video connection will also have a fairly characteristic bandwidth usage pattern. Tracking the requisite state is a bit tricky, but doable. This would allow them to throttle anything that looks like video streaming.
Whether or not they do this, I don't know. But it is technically feasible.
Now, technically, it is probably pretty obvious that what they ought to do is just limit bandwidth or not, regardless of what it is used for. But the rest of the business, and for that matter the rest of the world, conceives of video streaming as something different than "just using bandwidth", so they'll sign contracts about how video streaming will be treated better or worse depending on this or that condition ("Free netflix as long as we can throttle it", "we'll prioritize Disney+ because they paid us and everyone else gets degraded", etc.), so even if it makes no "logical" sense, network hardware will just have to figure out what "video streaming" is to fulfill the contracts whether the engineers like it or not.
- PaulHoule 5y agoMost of the common protocols for streaming video involve making a series of http requests to fetch short segments of video from a server. If there wasn't pipelining or QUIC requests going on it would be pretty obvious what was going on, but maybe less so if the requests were spread out across a number of servers. With pipelining or some other protocols the signature is going to be a sustained download that runs at a rate less than the maximum possible. If the servers are being found through DNS that's another tool to figure out what is going on. If not, the carrier is going to want a list of IP blocks associated with video streaming. What I don't get is customers caring a lot about whether they are getting 480p vs better. The old NTSC video was outright awful, and the difference between that and 480p is greater than that between a clean 480p and 720p, 1080p or even 4k. In the best circumstances the returns are diminishing but if you are viewing on a little phone screen in bright light what's the point?
- Piskvorrr 5y agoWell there's your answer, right in the question: "if you are viewing on a little phone screen in bright light". OTOH, if you are viewing on a big screen (such as, IDK, you might find on a TV), the resolution and compression artifacts become not just visible, but magnified.
- jerf 5y agoI wasn't even thinking of looking at where the traffic is going. You end up with a very characteristic pattern of bandwidth usage that can be detected, on that basis alone. It'll false positive and false negative sometimes but on average it'll be good enough. We're not talking cutting connections off, just throttling. If something other than video streaming briefly slows down, who's going to know to blame a false positive on the streaming throttling?