Communications of the ACM
Post Net Neutrality, Internet Providers Are Slowing Down Your Streaming
Researchers at Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted more than 500,000 data traffic tests across 161 countries.
Credit: Aria Bracci
In 2015, a team of Northeastern University researchers led by Dave Choffnes, developed Wehe, an app that tracked violations of net neutrality. Net neutrality rules were struck down two years later, and Choffnes and his colleagues have now shown that nearly every U.S. cell provider is "throttling" (slowing down transmissions of) data.
Working with researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Choffnes conducted more than 500,000 data traffic tests across 161 countries, to find that Internet service providers (ISPs) are "giving a fixed amount of bandwidth—typically something in the range of one and a half megabits per second to four megabits per second—to video traffic, but they don't impose these limits on other network traffic."
Due to differences in their users' mobile data plans, ISPs might throttle one user's Internet traffic but not another's.
The researchers observed that this behavior does not seem to have a clear rationale, as the ISPs are throttling video traffic even when the network does not need to do so.
From Northeastern University News
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