![]() There are cases for which streaming video is essential for public safety and educational purposes, and throttling can literally put lives and livelihoods at risk. The practice could have far-reaching implications for users as well as streaming services, Choffnes says. And so we wanted to make sure that we can provide sound empirical evidence as to what network providers are doing and the implications of what they’re doing in terms of throttling or other violations of net neutrality.” “Recent years have seen policy being made without important data about network management practices. “We had heard anecdotally that were engaging in violations of net neutrality and we wanted to develop a way to go out and measure this,” he says. ![]() It was amid this activity that Choffnes began researching throttling by wireless providers. New net neutrality rules, passed in 2015 then struck down two years later, were conceived to protect consumers’ ability to access all online information equally. Research shows that internet providers are slowing down your streaming “Such behavior is problematic because it threatens competition and fairness in the marketplace, potentially favoring some video streaming providers over their competitors.” “Differentiation opens the door to network providers picking winners and losers for example, which video streaming service gets to stream at higher resolution or not,” Choffnes says. When carriers throttle one type of network traffic-say, video streaming-but not another, this is called differentiation, and it constitutes a violation of net neutrality. AT&T has outright denied throttling different services based on content, despite evidence to the contrary from Wehe tests. Sprint has denied the study’s findings, says Choffnes, despite his team’s finding evidence of throttling on a lab phone set up with a Sprint prepaid plan. It mostly steered away from Vimeo (until January 2019), and did not throttle Skype tests. T-Mobile throttled Prime Video in 51 percent of the tests, Netflix in 61 percent of the tests, and YouTube in 67 percent of the tests. The carrier did not interfere with Amazon Prime Video tests that used encryption, but they did throttle tests without encryption, according to Choffnes. ![]() AT&T throttled 70 percent of Wehe users’ Netflix tests and 74 percent of their YouTube tests. They found that all four major carriers-AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon-throttle YouTube. The researchers discovered that just about every wireless carrier is guilty of throttling video platforms and streaming services unevenly. Using an app called Wehe (which Choffnes and two Northeastern students developed in order to track net neutrality violations) to test internet connections, Choffnes and his colleagues from the University of Massachusetts Amherst aggregated and analyzed data from more than 126,000 smartphones to determine whether data speeds are being slowed, or throttled, for specific mobile services. The findings were based on more than 1 million tests conducted from 2018 to 2019. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University But we don’t see evidence of internet service providers throttling only when the network is busy as far as we can tell, it’s 24/7, and everywhere.”ĭavid Choffnes, an associate professor of computer and information science at Northeastern. “Such overloads are rare and fleeting, so we would expect that a reasonable network management policy would throttle video only during such rare busy periods. “One reason you might throttle video is because you don’t have enough capacity for everyone to stream high-definition video at the same time,” he says. The practice is known as throttling, and according to a new study authored by David Choffnes, associate professor of computer and information science at Northeastern, carriers throttle videos all the time-even when networks are not overloaded. It’s probably why the YouTube trailer for the new Star Wars movie took you forever to watch on the train ride home. All wireless carriers admit to doing it: They slow down internet speed for video streaming, sometimes claiming that it is necessary to do so in order to control network congestion.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |