T-Mobile Says It's Not Throttling YouTube

One of the coolest things that T-Mobile is doing for its customers is the Binge On service that removes data usage for certain streaming sites from your data limit. That means you can stream all the YouTube you want without worrying about destroying your data allotment for the month in a day. The catch is that all videos streamed are throttled to 480p.

That throttling has YouTube up in arms because the company says that T-Mobile should be getting explicit permission to throttle the video from the customer. Even video services that haven't made a deal with T-Mobile to be included in Binge On are throttled by default according to YouTube.

T-Mobile is in full spin mode trying to eliminate and suggestion that it might be violating net neutrality rules having to do with throttling of video and web services. T-Mobile has stated that "throttle" is misleading and that it's not technically slowing down YouTube or other services.

T-Mobile claims what it is doing ins optimizing the video for mobile devices and that streaming is as fast or faster than it would be otherwise. Certainly locking the video to 480p saves T-Mobile on bandwidth that would be consumed if the video was streamed at 1080p or higher. Whether or not the FCC agrees with YouTube or T-Mobile remains to be seen.

SOURCE: DSL Reports