Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

Re:Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is do... by belorn on Tuesday September 18, 2018 @08:41AM (#18014735)

Could there be other causes than differentiation to explain the data collect? That would be an excellent questioning to ask the team at University of Massachusetts if they made a dissertation or research paper, since all the article says is that they used a established peer-reviewed technique that assumingly has gone through such questioning. It would be interesting to know the statistical probability that collocated servers would exclusively explain the data.

> now that I've read TFA, it's pretty clear that they're not talking about favoring providers, but rather, throttling entire classes of traffic.

I must strongly disagree there. What kind of different class of traffic would give throttled traffic to different forms of on-demand video stream services? NBCSports, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Amazon prime. I don't see it so please name the four different classes of traffic those sites represent that a congestion system would use as identifiers.

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Re:Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is do... by ti_ranger on Tuesday September 18, 2018 @12:07PM (#18016418)

> What kind of different class of traffic would give throttled traffic to different forms of on-demand video stream services? NBCSports, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Amazon prime.

There may be a small amount of packet loss at the time due to the ISP shaping their traffic to prevent congestion.

The higher the latency, the more the packet loss will affect the throughput.

The services you mention all use different CDNs, which may all have different latencies at the point of observation:

> NBCSports, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Amazon prime

NBCSports - I would guess Akamai, who deploys at IX and ISP Netflix - Usually Openconnect CDN devices at IX or ISP YouTube Premium - Google Global Cache deployed at IX and/or ISP (GCCs are deployed in most consumer ISPs, probably the best-distributed CDN at the moment). Amazon prime - Cloudfront, deployed mainly at IX, I am not sure if they have deployments in ISPs yet.

(I haven't tried to find more information on their approach, but https://dd.meddle.mobi/index.html seems to indicate that CDN issues shouldn't affect the way they measure, but until I do some checking on whether popular DPI platforms would be able to be fooled by this, and without them providing timestamped data, I'll have to test myself against DPI policies I wrote and I hope my ex-colleagues haven't changed too much ...)

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Re:Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is do... by timr on Tuesday September 18, 2018 @11:32AM (#18016121)

"I must strongly disagree there."

The article makes it clear what they did, and what conclusions they drew:

"Using a previously established, peer-reviewed technique, the team conducted more than half a million data traffic tests across 161 countries. From this data, the team found that internet service providers are “giving a fixed amount of bandwidth—typically something in the range of one and a half megabits per second to four megabits per second—to video traffic, but they don’t impose these limits on other network traffic.”

Moreover, the data shown directly below that paragraph reveals little pattern in the provider/app throttling rates. The data shows mostly that video is being throttled across the board.

Could there be other explanations for this? Absolutely. Peering is just one of many plausible explanations.

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