My love|hate relationship with T-Mobiles unfair binge campaign | Data inequality
Why it is UNFAIR, and NOT EQUAL
I like TMO.
That is saying a lot considering my attitude toward carriers. For the past decade, my attitude toward mobile services providers has been:
“You always use the one you hate the least, and the last one you had is always the one you hate the most.
If you follow my blog you know that I despise AT&T.
One day, I got so pissed off at AT&T because of how I was treated by a chat support agent who couldn’t find their own ass with both hands, that I rewarded the agent with early terminated a 2 year contract 6 months early.
I spent 7 years. getting bent over by AT&T’s ‘unlimited data’ limitations while laying down $140 every month, year after year. And every quarter AT&T would move the goalposts to try and squeeze me for an additional $20 here or modify the contract again — which starts the 2-year cycle all over again. I did this with AT&T for 7 years. Until I fired them. Then I went without cell service from anyone for about 5 months.
The throttling. The Stupid. The poor CS. And All the while I was paying AT&T $140; a month just to get nickel and dimed at the end of every billing cycle, forcing me to interact with $8.00/hr. chat support agents who could really give a shit less if they weren’t getting paid so much money to early-terminate the contracts of pissed off customers.
6 months later…I bought an iPhone 6 from T-Mobile.
Why do I like TMO?
Because in the face of the Federal Government who tries to legislate, ‘fair and equal’ in the context of internet packet switching and network optimization with the over reach of Net Neutrality, TMO publicly stated that they are going to allow some people to have unlimited bandwidth to consume certain specific content types with zero impact to data allotment.More succinctly:
The US Government legislated through FCC guidelines, that no one could pay extra money for a better or faster network. To the Government, that means equality. Everyone is required by law to be as slow as everyone else as there is no paying for faster service allowed under net neutrality.
That US Postal Service deal where you pay more for a faster delivery? That crap doesn’t fly on the internet. Want to buy faster internet speed from your ISP? That is ok. Why? Who the hell knows. Because Net Neutrality doesn’t ‘address the entire internet’. At least that’s what the FCC Chairman mumbled.
The Obama Administration misinterpretation of how packet data is handled.
It is the opinion of the current Administration, that: If you pay for faster service…you are also paying to make everyone else slower.
Let’s analyze that one more time.
If you pay for faster service…you are paying to make everyone else slower.
Relatively speaking, that is an accurate statement. It doesn’t take a lot of thinking power to realize that if you can run faster than everyone else by buying better shoes then everyone else runs slower than you. If you buy a high tech tungsten toaster to toast your pop tarts faster, everyone else’s pop tarts will end up toasting slower. The Government used this to create victimization. The governments disinformation campaign led people into thinking that the rich people in ‘advertising’ (the Big Business Boogeyman) were going to pay for faster internets via optimized internetwork!. But because advertisers are rich and can spend money on faster networks, the economic ‘disparity’ is now projected on internet packet data.
How? Because the High School student with a blog might not have the money for a faster ‘network.’ So the ‘internets’ that he operates his blog from will be relatively much ‘slower’ than the rich Advertisers network:
Most Internet providers have treated Internet traffic equally. That’s a principle known as “net neutrality” — and it says that an entrepreneur’s fledgling company should have the same chance to succeed as established corporations, and that access to a high school student’s blog shouldn’t be unfairly slowed down to make way for advertisers with more money.
Let me be clear on this: The high school blog doesn’t slow down because advertisers paid for an optimized internetwork. The blog speed is the same today As it was yesterday, and tomorrow the blogs speed will be just like it is today.
But because the economic disparity between a child’s Wordpress site and the Advertising Corporation with its huge marketing budgets, faster networks for only some people, mean ‘slower’ networks in relative speed. For those who went to public school: if you are driving 100 MPH, then that is your ‘network speed’. You drive 100 MPH today just like you did yesterday. But if tomorrow a rich person gets a car and decides to drive 120MPH, then you are now going -20MPH right?
Wrong. You are still going 100MPH…but because someone else can afford something 20 MPH faster than you, the focus must be put on the disparity between the speeds. That in essence is Net Neutrality.
That isn’t fair.
Well, life isn’t fair. And creating an internet that remains slow just to propagate an ideological fantasy that everything must be fair..that’s not fair either. Now T-Mobile has decided they don’t care about fair. Why should they when it is impossible for network traffic to be treated the same? T-Mobile said, “How is this for fair? If you watch YouTube videos, we are going to let YOU use as much bandwidth as you want and you don’t have to pay extra for that. But only (at the time) YouTube video. streams, and we will throw in all the Pokémon Go data you need. That is free as well!”
So what is wrong with doing that? Absolutely nothing. Businesses give away free shit all the time. But the FCC and the Obama Administration had just championed Equal Slowness for everyone on the internet with the net neutrality premise that all packets…irrespective of type or origin…should be treated the same so the people sending or receiving those packets will not be ‘discriminated’ against. No data should be treated differently, because, according to the government, packet data is the same.
Except for the fact that it is not the same. Some packets have text. Some have music. Others have video. And because packets in video streams need to move faster, have more to move, and must deploy before (in priority) non video data, it is impossible to treat them the same. Network traffic must have a priority because bits are sent one packet at a time. If you understand this concept, then you condone Packetism. You are a Packetist. You discriminate between the packet data just because of the type of data it is. Network Engineers built the internet by discriminating against certain packets and assigning priority…or privilege…over others. Packetism is woven into the fabric of this Internetwork.
Defying the Government by discriminating against the data type
Let’s place TMO’s YouTube (now HBO, Hulu, Netflix) and Pokémon Go data-binge program into the net neutrality fallacy of logic:
If only Video type data consumption (Watching YouTubes) is unlimited and doesn’t incur a negative impact on your data plan (irrespective of the fact that you might have an unlimited data plan or you might not), then by the tenets of Net Neutrality: Photo type data packets, web surfing data packets, blog text data packets and music type data packets now cost more money to transfer because they do count against your data plan.Now, just like the high school students network speed for his blog remained constant…your Cell phone data bill doesn’t change. But the big content providers (Big Business Boogeymen) like Google, Netflix, Hulu have an advantage because their product is video, and video doesn’t count against the data plan. But if you go to read that High School kids blog…guess what? That does count against your data plan.
So big businesses are now choking the high school students blog traffic, because blog text and photo type data depletes your data allotment. If you spend too much time reading blogs, (like you are right now) eventually your data plan allotment will be depleted, and you will have to pay via overage charge.
Of course, that will never happen if you watch videos of Beavis and Butthead on Netflix. In fact, you could sit and watch every Beavis and Butthead TV episode, Movie, holiday special, commercial spot and MTV reunion homage as many times as your eyes can stand the bleeding, and you will never pay an extra penny for doing so. So what happens? People stop reading because reading costs data. People stop uploading photos to their blogs because it’s too expensive, and no one reads anyway because watching video is free. Do you see what TMO is doing?
They have just created the environment that the President said Net Neutrality was supposed mitigate. Big corporations with lots of money choking a high school students blog. Why? Because all data is not the same. It will never be the same. But would you even want it to be?
My take
I am in the position to have a unique perspective on Net Net Neutrality from a mobile technology news publisher. Imthemobile.guru was developed and launched using mobile devices exclusively. The content is written on an iPhone or an iPad. So is all of the art, videos and still photos…all generated and uploaded using mobile devices. The content is about the culture and governance of mobile technology and It is formatted for consumption on mobile devices by you, the mobile technology aficionado.
From an operational standpoint, as the site operator and content creator for a knowledge sharing portal that doesn’t advertise or sell anything…it costs me a fair amount of money and time to operate, maintain and deploy my content to my community. That means it costs more for my readership to consume 10 minutes of content that I place here, than it would cost them to watch all 9 of the star wars movies back to back every day for a month on their cell phone.
But only If you subscribe to the false premise of Net neutrality as it is currently deployed
Research completed for this Article
When I am in content composition mode I use an iPhone to type text content in Ulysses, transfer that day to an iPad mini 4, square away the graphics and video put the package together and upload it using the iPhone as a bridge for the iPad connection to the internet.
What happens if you use too much data while an iPad or an iPod or another iPhone is connected to that hotspot? You run out. Then you have to buy more. But I could watch Porkeys 27 times this week and never run out of data. My current allotment is 14GB of tethered data (this is very obtuse to me because an iPad and an iPhone are the same architecture and therefore, data differential in consumption between them would be very small. So I decided to play with TMO and John Legare this morning with this Tweet:
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To which TMO responded:
And my retort:
In closing
While I do advocate an open internet, I am very much against the way that the US Government has used the projection of economic inequality between individual people and business to justify passing legislation that does absolutely nothing as I have outlined here. In case the Obama administration didn’t know, e-commerce is a leading factor and has a big impact on, not only GDP, but for economic viability for small businesses who can’t or won’t go B&M.
Creating division between the American Citizen and Ecommerce by big business is simply the wrong thing to do just to get support for legislation. It’s disappointing that the president has to resort to such divisive tactics just to pass a bill that is just as worthless as a law because there is no enforcement. There aren’t even guidelines written by Chairman Wheeler nor from the president that articulate their vision. With the proper descriptors I’m sure that the Obama administration can convey their vision with the proper attitude, instead of victimization, division and enough ambiguity to let people think net neutrality is about having more than 3 cable providers to choose from.
Ask anyone about net neutrality and that is what they will tell you.
Originally published at imthemobile.guru.
