Roger Fingas
T-Mobile on Monday announced a new marketing tactic, the "Wireless Customer Bill of Rights," which it plans to wield against its main rivals in the U.S. carrier market.
The document pushes policies that are already in place at T-Mobile, including free international data roaming and a moratorium on overage fees. The carrier is asking people to share the document with AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint via Twitter, or even print it out and take it to one of those companies' retail outlets.
A more elaborate Twitter-based campaign asks people to use the hashtag "#TweetJohn" to receive an emoji of T-Mobile CEO John Legere. If the emoji is used over 500,000 times by March 31, the carrier says it will use magenta chalk to write every post outside of high-traffic AT&T and Verizon stores around the U.S.
The promotion is intended to mark the third anniversary of T-Mobile's "Un-carrier" strategy. This positions the carrier as a "rebel" in the American cellular industry, and indeed some policies have actually forced its competitors to adapt, for example by all but eliminating once-standard two-year contracts.
The company has encountered flak, however, for some of its tactics. One of these is "Binge On," a perk — enabled by default — which lets subscribers stream video from participating services without it affecting their data caps. That video is degraded to 480p though, and at one point it was discovered that the company is throttling all video, regardless of whether the source is a partner company.
T-Mobile is working to fix that situation, but could still have to face concerns that Binge On violates the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules. These state that Internet service providers can't degrade traffic on the basis of content, app, or service.
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Andrew O'Hara
12 Comments
BingeOn isn't likely to face anything.. because it's completely in users hands if they want it enabled. I turn it off and back on regularly .. easy with their app.
Net Neutrality was mainly focused on lack of consumers choice when ISP providers created a high and low speed lane charing service providers (Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, etc) for a fast lane privilege. This fee would have to have been push onto consumer and they would have no choice in the matter.
Since T-Mo isn't charging providers for a fast lane (Netflix, YouTube, etc) or preventing people from opting out.. it's a non-issue.
The issue is... T-Mobile is throttling all
video to 480p claiming that they are "optimizing" the video, but still counting this video against your data plan. Because those companies didn't allow t-mo to "optimize there video. But t-mo is doing it anyways. Case in point is YouTube where google griped about being throttled. They didn't allow t-mo to include YouTube in there binge on service but they "optimized" the video anyways. This is why they are in conflict.
T-Mobile is not throttling anything. It's selecting a particular size video stream based on the option selected in your billing preferences. It selects the smaller size and does not charge that against your data plan.Your bandwidth remains the same and is only throttled when you reach your cap. You can turn off BingeOn and receive full glorious 720 or whatever the service you are watching offers, but you will see that show up on your dataplan usage. (In actuality, most services will adjust based on your connection and select the best stream for your connection, so you won't get that glorious 720 or whatever unless you force it in the service's settings and want a choppy stream or a long buffer time or have a very good connection. T-Mobile is simply preselecting what the services themselves already offer, and then only if you have BingeOn activated.)
It's very similar to T-Mobile's free music streaming; I rarely see any charges on that because I mainly listen to Pandora, Apple Music, and some other services included. My podcasts show up on my bandwidth usage, however. T-Mobile's BingeOn and Music services allows me to use less than 1GB of my bandwidth a month on a 2GB plan. That's a lot play room left over just in case, I don't know, the World Cup is on and Univision isn't included in BingeOn. :)
The YouTube thing was an error and T-Mobile fixed it, and YouTube is now on the BingeOn service, anyway, so that point is moot.
I think some people misunderstand what "throttling" means.