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> I was unclear. I'm suggesting that carriers are in fact, throttling all bulk data, but reporting is focused on video. Seems unlikely to me, but who knows ... > Also, to the extent that this throttling provides better availability in congested area, that's a plus for users. If you are being throttled, that's obviously not increasing availability in any meaningful sense, so, no, it's not. What would be a plus for users would be adding capacity. Not performing the contractually agreed service is the exact opposite of "increasing availability". Overall, the problem with all of this is that it borders on fraud. There would be no problem with selling low-bandwidth plans, if that is the only thing you can offer at economical prices. Or offering the user the choice to throttle certain services so as to conserve bandwidth. The problem is that carriers kinda-sorta sell a service and then don't do what they kinda-sorta promised. And a big part of the problem is that everyone frames this as "trying to help the customer by limiting abusers", or something similar, when really, the only abuser is the carrier selling a service they don't intend to perform, because they would have to spend money to do that. The important part is not whether some traffic is throttled, the important part is who makes the decision as to what gets throttled. If I buy 1 Mb/s mobile IP access, and then the carrier throttles my connection to 1 Mb/s, that's my decision. If I buy "LTE full-speed IP access", and then the carrier throttles my videos to 1 Mb/s with no option to opt out, it is not. |
Adding capacity is easy to say, but can be hard to do. Where I live, the city council basically won't permit new towers; whatever licensed spectrum on the towers we have is the capacity.
Trying to frame this as a contractual issue is a losing battle. Nowhere ever did someone contractually promise you a meaningful speed to an unknown destination at a consumer approachable price. Certainly, it's not transparent, and that's reason to be upset.