The other difference is that Verizon charges you the regular data rate for 480p, where T-Mobile gives it to you for free. It's a promotional offer, and overall you end up spending less money with T-Mobile probably. And if you want HD, I don't know where you get "$10 extra" from since it depends entirely on your data plan.
I didn't see the word fios in either article, so I would imagine it's just their cellular network. More limits to unlimited.
I get the sarcastic point you're making, but the point is that if you're streaming, you only care about receiving data as quickly as you consume it. If video becomes higher quality in the future, they have to send more bits/sec, but sending the maximum always is a waste. Of course, you can complain that as an ISP they should be treating all your data equally, but that's a separate issue.
Yep. I've got a 128GiB SD card in my MacBook partially for media. Bandwidth ain't free, or even readily available everywhere.
I don't understand what you are saying, maybe you can clarify. If streaming video only requires 10mbps and you have an 18mbps connection, do you think you are using 18mbps to pull the video data that only requires 10mbps? That doesn't make sense to me. It would seem to me you are only using the data that is required anyway and what you aren't using would be used if you were using multiple apps that require data.
Only if you're streaming live data. With VoIP, of course the other end is only sending at the rate it needs. But in the context of watching online videos that are already stored somewhere, the server might support sending at a faster rate, and the client might buffer more than it needs to. Maybe the server is smart enough to throttle that connection, but if it isn't, the ISP might want to.
I could see that with live data but not Netflix or YouTube. I also can stream live YouTube at home and it doesn't kill my connection either, just takes what it needs. I really don't understand why it would use more data to watch videos if it only requires x amount of data to stream. Thanks for trying to clarify but I'm still lost.
1. Agreed, they got caught.
Netflix and YouTube seem to be smart, and they do their own throttling, so the ISP shouldn't need to throttle them. If they did, it wouldn't do anything. But say you go to a dumb site that hosts a 30-minute, 100MiB MP4 video, and your browser or whatever is dumb too. It downloads the entire thing in 100 seconds when you play it then just plays the rest from cache. So you needlessly saturate your link for 100 seconds, and you might not even watch the entire video.
So essentially, Verizon further throttles a throttled service, lol. What mobile devices would even have this "dumb" browser? Seems to me like they just throttled video to throttle people.
I think the speed tests are BS. Yeah, I see 60Mbps too, then I go to any site and wait 10 seconds for a 1MiB image to load.
Safari does this. I actually haven't seen a web browser throttle a video stream before. The entire thing just loads instantly. Netflix and YouTube have custom clients, but I actually had a plugin for Safari that loaded YouTube with QuickTime instead, which loaded the video as quickly as YouTube's servers could send it (because I wanted YouTube to load when I had the video paused).
I think so. Other issue is latency. A site with a bunch of little resources that load more resources will take many round trips to load, which is slow regardless of your bandwidth. LTE latency isn't great. Sadly, people focus more on bandwidth and ignore latency, so ISPs can sell crappy connections that look great on paper.Haha... fair point.
Maybe they are un-throttling SpeedTest.net? Giving it a fast lane?
Ok that makes sense, I guess I've just never seen it first hand. No matter what video I watch in safari, mine buffers, then plays. I've never had a video download completely before I made it 3/4 of the way through.
Yeah, laws can not be reversed, so just get used to it. Do not question, just accept and go back to grazing.
I have ways to test this easily. Playing a 100MiB, 10 minute video from my own server right now... I paused it, and the entire thing loaded (slowly) while I was only 5 seconds in.
Because they can gouge everyone at "X" amount per/gigabyte over and make more money that way.
Personally, I'd like to throttle my own LTE connection. Wish iOS had an option for that. The only time I ever load 50MiB/s is when some stupid auto-play video ad comes up.
I have had to pause and load a couple times when I was way out in the sticks on 2g. What if you are using Netflix in PIP mode on an iPad Pro and are browsing the web? Would your whole connection be limited to 10mbps or just for the Netflix app?
I've done some educational work with LTE packet gateways. I'm by no means an expert, but from what I've seen, my guess is they'll only throttle the Netflix connection. The gateway supports packet filters that inspect and place packets into different "bearers," which are like virtual connections that are each treated differently in very customizable ways. I'll bet they create a 10mbit/s-capped bearer for traffic originating from Netflix's servers.
I get what you are saying but I disagree, I would absolutely notice the 35mbps is 5x faster.
One can hope they will create those bearers. I don't know a lot about lte but I'm sure glad you do! Thanks for helping me to see what is going on, I appreciate it.
