I know Tmobile has been throttling video for a while now so I thought someone may be able to help answer my question here.
Verizon is going to start throttling video down to 720p\480p depending on your so-called ‘unlimited’ plan. My question is this video throttling based on protocol, ip address of the providers, or ‘looking’ for streaming data feeds?
Also, since the video is playing directly from my PMS Verizon doesn’t know it as a streaming provider so if they are going to throttle based on protocol then how does it get around Plex’s encrypted tunnel between client and PMS? Worst case I figured I’ll use my VPN which should ‘hide’ the traffic from Verizon so they shouldn’t be able to throttle it.
*Sidenote - I really don’t care about quality above 720p because on a 5 inch screen I really don’t care about the resolution difference because I’m not watching visually stunning movies on my phone anyway, I’ll use my 120" projector for that. Also, the throttling for 720p is a max of 10mbps, which seems like a pretty damn good 720p picture.
This is just my assumption about this whole thing so take it with a grain of salt.
Since the communications between PMS and client are encrypted and the fact that you are not a known provider of content i.e. Youtube or Netflix no wireless provider will have the ability to re-encode your video down to a specific resolution.
They will however be able to categorize this data as unclassified since it is not a known content provider and limit its bandwidth which will force your PMS to trans-code at lower resolutions like 480p.
I doubt you will need any sort of VPN to keep doing what you are doing today.
And yeah I totally agree about screen size and resolution.
I do not know how they do things but I can only say I have t-mobile and they do not throttle my video from my Plex server. I cannot imagine how Verizon would either. They would need to know where streams are coming from and probably only really doing this to major public streaming services like netflix, amazon, HBOgo, Hulu, Youtube and the like.
same reason Plex servers cannot be on tmobiles whitelist thing they did last year to not charge data for video streamed from some services. The service needed to provide tmobile with info to do that. i think because it need to be a service from a particular URL. every plex users server is at a unique IP so would not work
@nokdim said:
They will however be able to categorize this data as unclassified since it is not a known content provider and limit its bandwidth which will force your PMS to trans-code at lower resolutions like 480p.
Why would they limit the bandwidth for ‘unclassified’? Anything that is running through SSL, which is most sites these days, are ‘hidden’ from the ISP (Verizon). This doesn’t seem right to me.
True most sites are SSL but most sites are not as bandwidth intensive as plex so they could apply some traffic shaping and most wouldn’t ever notice.
My thought is they would have a white list of sorts so if you are watching Verizon provided content you would get the most bandwidth of course for the best experience, after that if you are getting data from a Verizon contracted content provider you would get bandwidth but not as much as Verizon provided content and if you are none of these you would end up unclassified and with the least amount of guaranteed bandwidth I know it doesn’t make sense but that is how corporate greed works.
I play the same funny games with bandwidth on non wireless networks based on who pays the most so I can only assume they do the same on wireless.
