If they just started somehow throttling all VPN traffic, this is easy to detect, and they'd be in breach of contract.
It still won't matter with the current crowd in the White House. Nobody will enforce anything.
Traffic shaping (QoS) according to protocol is nothing new, and it can actually generally improve responsiveness for everyone given a congested network. If my VOIP packets have exactly the same priority as your Netflix - I'll be the one to suffer for it. On the other hand, if my VOIP has higher priority than your video, I'll get a good VOIP session, and thanks to buffering, you will still probably get the same quality video.
The overall drop in bandwidth being offered sucks, but it also seems a bit more honest than their previous "unlimited" offerings.
Again, this is only the case in my eyes so long as Verizon doesn't start offering a fast lane for certain providers. If (probably more "when" than "if") they start doing this, then I'll gather up my torch and pitchfork and join in the fun.
Personally, I don't do video over LTE, but I would like to use the mobile hotspot feature on my phone more often without having to worry about going over. And as long as it is enough for me to use ssh, RDP, or VNC, then I'm good. Other people, of course, have different requirements.
I'm kinda in the same boat where I'm not someone who is just churning through video bandwidth, im rarely hitting 5GB across 2 phones on a heavy month. But that said I also would like to get great quality for the videos I do watch, and occasionally I'll throw a video to a tv and there you can definitely appreciate higher bandwidth there. I mean, I don't see the problem with the world where you can let applications & operation systems present choices to users, who will then set sensible defaults / pick and choose / etc. Enforcing this on a network layer is a pretty extreme measure.
Also, was the old unlimited truly unlimited in all ways? If so, how can every single customer of any company actually get unlimited data, all the time without unlimited hardware appearing from nowhere and radio wave spectrum that expands to unlimited use for unlimited people?
The old plans and the new plans both defined “unlimited” as a number of GB of full speed which could degrade after so much use, so that’s never been at issue. That was a usage plan but the network traffic was not treated differently (or wasn’t supposed to be). Now the plans also perform content-based network degradation at all times, regardless of data usage, which is a shot at net neutrality for sure.
This is a somewhat silly argument. I remember the same concern over Wheeler; everyone was tripping over themselves to praise him when he turned out to be pro-net neutrality.
Wheeler was the exception.
Pai will be handsomely rewarded for all the billions he's generated for the telcos.
Uhhh unlimited but it'll never be fast! Uhhh we can re-encode your video, unless it's streamed from Verizon (you know this part's coming...), deal with it!
Can't wait for VPN technology to become more widespread, so we can keep these crooks from altering our traffic.