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What do you want to know
- Research shows that the four largest US telecommunications companies control video streaming, regardless of congestion.
- The research was conducted by Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
- The tests involved 126,000 smartphone users and more than 650,000 tests were performed between early 2018 and early 2019.
If you have ever had the impression that your mobile operator was slowing down your video broadcast, you were probably right. According to a recent study, researchers have found that the four main operators limit video streaming, even when networks are not congested.
While it is common for wireless operators to slow down connections when mobile networks are saturating to avoid congestion, research shows that operators are slowing traffic so consistently that it does not matter whether the network is cluttered or not.
"They do it all the time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and that does not rely on network overhead," said David Choffnes, associate professor at Northeastern University and one of the authors of l & # 39; study.
The results of the study showed that mobile operators are restricting the bandwidth of video streaming on their networks for several services. However, not all restrictions are equal, some services being isolated, others not.
In particular, it has been shown that AT & T strangled Netflix 70% of the time, as well as YouTube 74% of the time. However, it allowed the free reign of Amazon Prime Video and did not restrict it at all.
The tests also revealed that in 51% of the tests, T-Mobile had strangled Amazon Prime Video, but had left Vimeo virtually intact, and that Skype was unrestricted.
The reason why some services are restricted compared to others could be attributed to the mistakes of telecom operators who can not detect the stream, as some applications make technical changes from time to time.
"They can try to prevent any video from making things fair, but Internet service providers can not dictate how content providers are broadcasting their video," Choffnes said. "Then some content providers are limited and others are not."
Despite the death of Internet neutrality, Choffnes believes that research and publication of results is still very important, stating: "At least when the legislation interests us, we will have the data".
Choffnes' work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Alphabet Inc., parent company of Google, and ARCEP, the French telecommunications regulator. Amazon has also provided free services for this effort. He even signed an agreement with Verizon to measure the limitation on US carriers. Choffnes says that Verizon can not limit its ability to publish research and that companies that support it do not influence its work.
The research in question was conducted by Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. It had 126,000 smartphone users worldwide, using an app called "Wehe" on Android and iOS. The data comes from more than 650,000 tests performed between early 2018 and early 2019.
How much mobile data does multimedia streaming use?
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