T-Mobile's Binge On Throttles ALL Videos, Even Ones That Count Towards Your Cap

[LAwLz]

 

Back in November T-Mobile were making headlines with their new service called "Binge On". What the service did was allow T-Mobile customers to stream video from selected sites, at reduced quality, and the data would not count towards their monthly data cap.

It sounds great in theory, but as it turns out T-Mobile has gotten a lot of flack for not being completely honest with their service. Among the companies complaining is Google. Many users noticed that YouTube was not one of the video platforms included in the Binge On program. That should not matter that much. If it's not in the program it should just work like normal video streaming without Bringe On, right? Wrong!

As it turns out, if you have Binge On enabled then T-Mobile will "optimize" all videos you stream or download. So if you got Binge On then T-Mobile will cap you at 480p YouTube videos as well as counting it towards your data cap.

 

What is even scarier are the things the EFF found when they looked into Bringe On.

The things they tested were:

Streaming in Browser - This was a video using the HTML5 <video> tag on their own servers. Their own servers are not part of Binge On and will therefore count towards the data cap.

Direct Download - This was a video file being downloaded to the phone. Direct download, not streamed.

Direct Download (Non-Video File Extension) - This test was the same as the direct download, but instead of downloading let's say "video.mp4", it was "notavideo.exe". It was still the same file though. This was to done to test if T-Mobile used some deep packet inspection or similar technology to detect videos inside the TCP packet.

 

 

The result is that yes, T-Mobile does throttle you. if you have Binge On then you will be capped at about 1.5Mbps download speed for all videos, regardless of them counting towards your data cap or not. T-Mobile are also able to detect which type of file you are downloading without having to rely on file names or content-type in the HTTP header, although they deny deep packet inspection.

The EFF also inspected the video files they downloaded and found that there was no changes done to them in terms of quality. The only thing Binge On did to the video files were capping the download rate at 1.5Mbps.

 

 

 

How did John Legere react to this?

He reacted by saying Google were just out for attention and to the EFF he responded "who the fuck are you EFF? Why are you stirring up so much trouble and who pays you?".

 

 

 

What do you think? I was very skeptical from the start and now that all this has been discovered I think it is a terrible program. If this is not breaking net neutrality then it is dangerously close to doing it. It also throttles users behind their backs which is a really bad thing to do. I am very disappointed by T-Mobil and I am appalled by John's ignorance.

 

Someone had a fantastic twitter conversation with T-Mobile support about it (full conversation here).

[Clear17Mud]

my T-Mobile video hasn't changed at all since it was released, so I don't care. YouTube and Netflix work fine.

 

First

 

also you seem to only be seeing this from one study, so its not a very scientific experiment. If another place replicates the information then I'd like to see that along with this.

[TheAmazingCookieFromSquare]

I knew it all from the beginning

 

This whole no data while watching YouTube and Netflix had to be a scam

[Philcat101]

So that is the catch...

So all videos are capped? This is stupid.

[samcool55]

should be Throttle on, geez they can't even spell properly D:

 

Only from T-mudpile of course...

[Clear17Mud]

I knew it all from the beginning

 

This whole no data while watching YouTube and Netflix had to be a scam

no youtube still counts for data its like my only source of data.... Mostly Linus breaking things at that...

[QueenDemetria]

I knew this, in fact T-Mobile stated it back when they announced BingeOff. Nobody really covered it, except for Business Insider, which you can see here: http://www.businessinsider.com/t-mobile-binge-on-reduces-video-quality-2015-11

 

In my user review of BingOn I am going to tear them apart for this, in practicality it ruins the "binge" experience. At least they allow you to completely disable BingeOn though, they don't hide throttling like Big Red.

[Clyne]

I knew this, in fact T-Mobile stated it back when they announced BingeOff. Nobody really covered it, except for Business Insider, which you can see here: http://www.businessinsider.com/t-mobile-binge-on-reduces-video-quality-2015-11

 

In my user review of BingOn I am going to tear them apart for this, in practicality it ruins the "binge" experience. At least they allow you to completely disable BingeOn though, they don't hide throttling like Big Red.

Most of the time it's just service areas that have decent speeds or not for Verizon...

[BobbyG2]

I noticed about a month ago it seems like I've been hitting a lot more buffering. Not sure if it's from this or not. I have unlimited data, do you think using a VPN would bypass any throttling they might be doing to me?

[ttam]

I've used Tmobile for 10 years, have a grand fathered in unlimited data package and never notice throttling. I typically arrive to service calls 10-15 minutes early and stream up netflix/youtube with an average of ~140gb a month =/ I do notice that sometimes youtube will come in at 480p by default but can change the quality back to 1080 no problem.

[SurvivorNVL]

This is why I am excited to get off Verizon, and all carriers for Google-Fi - may make use of both T-Mobile and Sprint, but should be nice.  As for this - I expected better of T-Mobile and Legere.