Just days after an exhaustive research study, reported by AVN.com, revealed that the major telecommunications companies “throttle,” or slow down, online video streams—not only during peak usage hours but 24 hours per day—one of those telecoms now says that it has “resolved” the problem.
According to a report by the networking industry news site Light Reading, T-Mobile “declined to provide any details around the situation, including how many customers might have been affected, but said the issue had been resolved.”
Even before the blockbuster study by researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Northeastern University showed the T-Mobile was among the worst offenders, artificially slowing video traffic from Amazon Prime 51 percent of the time, Reddit users had complained in that online forum about T-Mobile, “enforcing a bitrate cap on streaming services.”
The capping, or throttling, occurred after users had reached a 50 gigabyte monthly data limit, according to the Reddit reports.
While T-Mobile at least claims to have addressed the issue—somehow—AT&T has simply denied the findings of the massive throttling study, claiming that the researchers were likely seeing the differences in streaming data speeds between users who had chosen different plans, according to the tech news site CNet.
"We offer customers choice, including speeds and features to manage their data," an AT&T spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the study was conducted using the app Wehe, which “fails to account for a user's choice of settings or plan that may affect speeds.”
Other than T-Mobile and AT&T, no other major ISP has yet commented on the study’s findings.
The now-repealed Obama-era net neutrality rules had prohibited throttling of online video, or other data streams. But cases of ISPs slowing down data also occurred even when the rules were in effect, between 2015 and 2018. In 2016 T-Mobile paid a $48 million fine for failing to fully inform customers about its throttling policies and practices.
Photo by Coolcaesar / Wikimedia Commons
