My full time home internet connection is a grandfathered Verizon unlimited data plan (I work full time from an RV). Unfortunately, some websites (like Netflix) try to be "nice" and limit quality or provide the mobile only version of their sites based on knowing that my IP is on Verizon's cellular network. This makes for a terrible experience for me on some sites (not many fortunately). There should never be throttling like this without an option to select quality.
As data becomes cheaper more and more people are going to ditch their cable/DSL companies and just use mobile data and websites need to be prepared for it.
> As data becomes cheaper more and more people are going to ditch their cable/DSL companies and just use mobile data and websites need to be prepared for it.
That isn't likely to happen. The demand for wireless data is more likely to go up than down.
This isn't like fiber where you can just replace the terminating equipment and go from 100Mbps to 1Gbps to 10Gbps. To get more bandwidth out of the same spectrum you need more towers. As the density of the towers increases you have to reduce their power level to keep them from interfering with each other. So getting more bandwidth out of the same amount of spectrum requires a quadratic increase in the number of towers. That ain't cheap and somebody's got to pay for it.
What seems more likely is that cellular data will get somewhat more expensive and people will strongly prefer to have wifi because it will be cheaper.
I also use a grandfathered Verizon unlimited data plan and Foxfi (to turn my phone into a hotspot) as my sole internet connection. I play xbox live, watch youtube, netflix, and amazon streaming, hbogo, etc all over this connection. I have never noticed any degradation in quality of content. I use approximately 200gb of data per month over the air.
USAToday is covering the story without paywall. [1]
Quick read indicates they aren't 'throttling' they're serving lower quality (e.g. smaller) videos to mobile users so as not to use up their data plan as much while they develop a feature allowing users to select their own stream quality in app.
Seems reasonable enough.
They should have been more up front about it though.
Edit
Ok, now I'm confused. How does this story relate to the existing feature to lower your streaming quality? [2]
As data becomes cheaper more and more people are going to ditch their cable/DSL companies and just use mobile data and websites need to be prepared for it.