Reminds me of developing countries that leapfrog industrialized G8 countries in certain technologies, like skipping landline deployments and going straight for wireless networks.
You'd be right if the carrier denied data access beyond a certain limit despite advertising "unlimited".
But if the carrier chooses to throttle an "unlimited" data plan and thus degrades the delivery speed outside of "network management" contexts (such as congested network conditions) then they are now subject to additional punitive fines arising from net neutrality regulations that they are now subject to, on top of any (successful) fines related to misrepresentative advertising.
This falls under the category of willfully "impairing, or degrading" an existing service motivated by business interests related to the specific subscriber, instead of driven by purely technical network management justifications which would apply to a wider geographic area (i.e. not subscriber-specific), and this is one of the bright-line examples given by the FCC when they issued their press release.
As a side note, I believe the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Bureau of Consumer Protection handles deceptive advertising enforcement, while the FCC handles net neutrality enforcement.
As a parent, and as a person working in the wireless industry, I share this frustration. The main issue is that a true client-based parental-control solution will:
a) eat up more data as the client's parental control component needs to continually update its URL database;
b) require more CPU and RAM (i.e. more expensive phone) if you want a better "content inspection" engine (since URLs are notoriously easy to bypass);
c) you are willfully acting as a MITM and creating a backdoor by forcing all content to be decrypted in some way for the solution to work effectively and only controlled by you (the parent), which may (or may not) compromise your stance on the issue of e2e encryption, privacy and security;
d) (your point above and following from c) having to personally safeguard and secure your child's device;
e) on Android, is it even possible to not root the device? Where's there's a will, there's a way: most kids with smartphones coupled with an incentive to bypass controls (Minecraft was a good example given above) could easily root their device, or eventually social engineer their parents into choosing future devices that are rootable.
However, the network practice must be primarily used for and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management and not business purpose. For example, a provider can’t cite reasonable network management to justify reneging on its promise to supply a customer with “unlimited” data.
Which MVNOs? I probably missed which, if any, MVNOs have better integrated WiFi wireless telecom services than T-Mobile because they're usually entirely dependent on the big four networks (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) for voice and a variety of data platforms.
Re. "95% open spectrum" - Now we're really getting into the interesting tangents!
I'm still on the fence about de-privatizing spectrum for a variety of reasons. But the biggest elephant in the room whenever discussing spectrum de-privatization is that the FCC earned US$45 billion from wireless carriers last year, and US$19 billion in 2008's auction (http://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-rakes-in-45-billion-from-wirele...). In the grand scheme of the entire US federal budget, I think that's just a drop in the bucket. But it's still money that the federal government looks forward to.
So on the one hand, the FCC wants to play fair for consumers and tax-payers. On the other hand, the FCC can't really restructure an existing industry without biting the hand that literally feeds their existence to the tune of US$2-3 billion per year if you imagine their auction revenue as ratable over the years an auction doesn't take place.
Except where such variations in communications service are explicitly authorized by the consumer.
A counter example that I bet T-Mobile is waiting to deploy is parental control. As strange as it sounds, there are actually families that pay to have their wireless carrier restrict adult content while on-net.
EDIT: "As strange as it sounds" refers to the fact that most parental control solutions are network-based, when in fact a proper parental control solution should be client-based because as soon as your child goes to WiFi at MacDonalds/Starbucks they probably have access to all the adult content they want to see by bypassing the wireless carrier parental control network controls.
1) they are allowing customers to opt-out (maybe they will concede this could be improved, but it doesn't change their fundamental desire to circumvent net neutrality);
2) content discrimination has positive benefits for consumers (i.e. allows higher consumption of content)
T-Mobile may be willing to bet that the FCC and consumer groups will be hard-pressed to claim that sending HDTV vs. EDTV falls under a discriminatory context given the consumer benefits and (seeming) fulfillment of video service.
It's various shades of spin. For unencrypted videos, T-Mobile might be using other techniques beyond throttling (e.g. downshifting the resolution). Or perhaps he's trying to get around strict throttling by claiming (in his head) that they're only throttling videos, while other data isn't being touched.
I wonder if he's on an internal hunt to find out who confirmed to the EFF that videos were being "throttled".
I wish I could upvote you more than once. BingeOn provides limited relief for consumers using data while on-net, and are the most advanced amongst the American wireless carriers around integrated WiFi services.
For example, they were the first as far as I can tell to launch extensive WiFi calling and WiFi SMS, even extending to some American airlines (at least for WiFi SMS - calling is possible but socially unaccepted on planes).
Wireless carriers as a general rule are all looking at WiFi offload capabilities especially as 802.11ad and up provide higher transmission rates (peak and average theoreticals).
There is a race to perfect and bring to market seamless WiFi-base station handoffs (both ways) in real-world conditions. I suspect that will require a combination of channel (i.e. mobile devices) + wireless network upgrades, so in the meantime carriers need to bridge the gap. This is arguably a pretty good strategy assuming T-Mobile is expecting WiFi to handle even more of their traffic overtime.
You were downvoted because you are incorrect. The whole point of this debate is that wireless carriers were re-classified to fall under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 and Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 last February.
To play devil's advocate here, does this mean companies shouldn't even offer time-limited freebies (e.g. promotional offerings "Buy 2 data packages for the price of 1! Limited Time offer!")?
Or is the worry that only indefinitely free offerings can set the stage for trouble later? To me both viewpoints set the stage for trouble, except the indefinite free offering is a darker shade of gray.
After that, they degrade services that are not paying them and zero-rate + allow higher bitrates for services that pay them.
"degrade services that are not paying them" and "allow higher bitrates for services that pay them" would even more blatantly violate FCC net neutrality in the US.
T-Mobile here is circumventing this by only zero-rating with an opt-out mechanism. If they tried to pull a stunt like Deutsche Telekom in Germany, they'd be fined in no time by the FCC in a clear and shut case. They are doing something far more subtle here in the US.
EDIT: For clarity, Deutsche Telekom is a majority shareholder of T-Mobile USA.
Proprietary technology meant technology vendor technology bought and used by T-Mobile, not that it was proprietary to T-Mobile, unless Legere believes that T-Mobile's specific call flows or specific snowflake network configuration is part of this definition.
So other carriers sure could implement the same thing, but nobody is crazy enough to do that until they figure out how T-Mobile subscribers and the FCC respond.
Netflix uses adaptive streaming to stream their videos. It is inherently a greedy algorithm; if the stream determines there is bandwidth available, without a throttle Netflix will try to go to 1080p (or whatever the highest bitrate available for that stream).
Consumers with LTE phones + data caps benefit the most from BingeOn. Possibly, they are a significant % of T-Mo consumers and are happy with the trade-off.
When net neutrality's recent concrete lightning rod was around Netflix having to pay for their customers to have enhanced services, that was a clear case of favouring one type of service over another from a network QoS perspective.
If a customer is paying for a service, they owe it to the customer to deliver those bytes equitably and with ideally the same level of service. This was not happening in Netflix's case, and the spirit of net neutrality absolutely applied there.
* Couldn't you make exactly the same argument about fast lanes? Why is it bad to give consumers some of their data faster?*
I'm suggesting that we can't make the same argument about fast lanes because that specific concept involves applying different service levels (faster/slower) to specific content types. It's bad to give consumers specific types of data faster if carriers are intentionally crippling popular over-the-top (OTT) players and then forcing customers to pay for the "actual" speeds that they paid for in their [50Mbps|100Mbps|Gigabit] package.
However, in this particular case, T-Mobile (supposedly) isn't changing anything related to your existing service level. All of your existing bytes counting towards your data cap are presumably still being delivered equitably, barring network congestion conditions. The only thing that has presumably changed is the way that those bytes are being billed (in this case, free) for certain content providers.
A distinction needs to be made between delivery of bytes + resultant abhorrent actions (e.g. deliberately crippling a popular endpoint or content type and giving customers no choice but to pay for a service level they've already paid for = evil), and maintaining the same service delivery level while charging for them differently.
* Let's look at it another way: Making connections to providers on this list effectively cheaper (but not touching the data cap) is equivalent to making providers NOT on the list cost more.*
I agree with you in principle, but that once strong argument centered around input costs and promotional offerings, which ultimately ends up in the "subsidies" bucket. Originally, the premise was that access to providers was selectively made more expensive and one often didn't have a say in the matter. You're correct that zero-rating (similar, but not quite the same, as the Internet.org debacle) influences consumer behaviour. However, T-Mobile is giving principled consumers a way out - by continuing to offer the same level of service today as they will tomorrow (or whenever it comes into effect) with zero-rating enabled, they're letting consumers speak with their wallets in both literal senses of the word (opt-out, or switch to another carrier).
I can't speak to the indie stations issue like Shoutcast, but if it can be shown that T-Mobile's sign up process isn't as easy as they make it out to be then this may be the Achilles heel that the FCC can leverage.