Mobile ‘dumbfounded’ by YouTube’s stance toward Binge On

Although T-Mobile has stated Binge On works with just its 24 allied partners, some companies like YouTube have spoken out regarding the fact that the new program throttles all video and not just the content of its partners. As the EFF added, Binge On uses services’ own technology to downgrade video content as if the user’s own bandwidth was slow, resulting in an overall poor viewing experience. Google has been complaining about the Binge On service since last month, saying that T-Mobile was throttling Youtube, the popular video streaming site.

EFF also discovered that this optimization by T-Mobile only means video throttling to 1.5Mbps and not always 480p. Simply, it would be the ability for subscribers to stream videos on smartphones from select websites without dwindling away at their precious data plans.

You can read through the entire article now, but the bottom line is this: T-Mobile’s Binge On service is throttling all video to 1.5 megabytes per second, regardless of where the video itself has come from. The organization wrote in a post that T-Mobile is applying its throttling indiscriminately to all video streaming, not just YouTube.

The EFF recommends that T-Mobile fixes these problems, beginning with Binge On. Videos streaming at 480p would be “optimized” for the Binge On service. “We aren’t big fans of the way that T-Mobile has gone about it”.

T-Mobile never denied that it was downgrading all video and points out that customers have the option of disabling Binge On. Clearly some type of deep packet inspection is being performed to identify video traffic (T-Mobile refused to clarify what kind of inspection that might be).

Each time, EFF attempted to access video over T-Mobile’s network in one of four different ways: Streaming an HTML5 video embedded from a webpage, downloading a video file directly to the SD card, downloading a video file with the file extension masked (so it wouldn’t be treated as a video), and downloading a large non-video file for comparison. Companies that cooperate with T-Mobile can stream video without counting against customers’ high-speed data limits. They assert that the wireless firm is harming consumer interests by reducing video quality from sites which are not even a part of Binge On and only throttle videos provided by organizations who have signed up for the service.

“It also accuses the telecom giant of violating the Open Internet Order created by the FCC, which says that IPS “…shall not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of Internet content, application, or service…subject to reasonable network management”.