T-Mobile Responds to “Throttling” Concerns

[dgstorm]

Here's a video of T-Mobile's response to the BingeOn "Throttling" controversy:


What do you think of his assertions?

 

[TisMyDroid]

I think he's full of poo poo! He skirts and disguises the definition of throttling. That he streamlines and limits the content that gets loaded on the web so you use less data? C'mon, who's he trying to fool? Well, lots of people. Essentially, what I gathered from his explanation is that you get high speed of anything that is included in their binge-on services and everything else gets throttled, including competing streaming services that are not binge-on.

Sent from my SM-N920V using Tapatalk

 

[CTownDroid]

He does have one thing rite, "if Dumb and Dumber" had come up with it first, they would charge for it. That's for sure!

 

[cr6]

This guy is an idiot and is banking on the average consumer not knowing better. He claims he's not throttling, yet 30 seconds later admits to it, but instead compares it to "economy mode" on your car? Wow!
I'll gladly give "dumb & dumber" a little extra money to keep from having to deal with this guys constant whining. If he put as much time & effort into building up his network then he does making these videos, he'd have surpassed dumb & dumber by now to be the dumbest of them all. Oh wait....there's something wrong with that analogy.

S5 tap'n

 

[TisMyDroid]

That is exactly it...He's banking on the average consumer not knowing any better because sadly many do not. And I bet if they called TM to complain because their internet is too slow, they will get a bogus scripted explanation that makes them feel good.

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[thunderbolt_nick]

I just got off of Legere doing a Periscope trying to explain the program and answer questions. I got to hand it to him, he knows how to deal with trolls. The biggest concern everyone kept raising up is about other services being capped at a 1.5 mbps cap (or something around there). Doesn't matter if it is 480p or 1080p, every video app was capped at that specific speed. From a business standpoint, I can see why TMO would want to do this. The thing is, and what they talked about on TWiT, is was it really ethical to hide behind that curtain of BingeON to do so?

In my opinion, as long as they would keep it opt-in I don't really see the harm.

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[kodiak799]

This guy is an idiot and is banking on the average consumer not knowing better.

I wouldn't call him an idiot - I'd say he CAN bank on the average consumer not knowing better.

I laugh because I said for years that eventually TMo would have to monetize its subscriber growth. They did something different, apparently, which was to way oversell their capacity so they come up with gimmicks like this.

People cry about VZW, but I pay the same price I did for minutes as I did 15 years ago, same price for UDP as I did 6 years ago. And I've never been throttled and have consistently good service, even when my signal is weak.

 

[dgstorm]

Legere went on the offensive against EFF and got Twitter-slammed. He backtracked and apologized, but is still trying to defend his position on BingeOn. Here's an article with some of the details: T-Mobile's CEO does damage control, apologizes to the EFF

 

[pc747]

Of course he is going to defend BingeOn, at this point he can't back out. Right now T-Mobile is still looking up at AT&T and Verizon. Yeah they managed to get a few people to switch but many of those who switch have the same complaint, "man this is not as reliable (or fast) as my other service".

Yes there are areas where T-Mobile can hold its own with the big two as far as speed and strength is concerned. Unfortunately that is only if the customer remains in that one spot and not move. Until T-Mobile can get their infrastructure to where AT&T and Verizon is at they are stuck with finding every way possible to grab customers. And right now the one hot topic is that the big two have expensive data share plans and people love to consume data via social media and streaming apps. T-mobile did not magically come up with some extra towers out of nowhere, so in order to make the plan seem awesome they are going to have to pull some trickery and hope no one catches on. And for the most part the average customer will not notice until they use an app like Netflix or Youtube that their data is at a crawl.

So how do you fix that?

You have a program where certain apps can opt in to be part of a program where customers can use the service for "free". And with those apps you turn up the dial just a touch so that the apps work enough to satisfy the customer but clearly not at that high data speeds that they are advertising. That plus apps optimized to perform better at slower data speeds (not to mention free hotspots being all over the place) and you now have a happy customer despite not having the coverage that their competitors have.