U.S. wireless carriers have long said they may slow video traffic on their networks to avoid congestion and bottlenecks. But new research shows the throttling happens pretty much everywhere all the time. Researchers from Northeastern University and University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted more than 650,000 tests in the U.S. and found that from early 2018 to early 2019, AT&T throttled Netflix 70% of the time and Google’s YouTube service 74% of the time. But AT&T didn’t slow down Amazon.com’s Prime Video at all.
Google is in talks to help create a fourth U.S. wireless carrier, even as Sprint and T-Mobile struggle to get their controversial merger cleared with federal and state authorities.
Jessell | Do Broadcasters Deserve A Bit Of C-Band Gold?
As owners of earth stations, broadcasters may be able to cut themselves in for a portion of the billions that satellite operators hope to get from the sale of some of their C-band spectrum to 5G wireless carriers. But I’d rather see the taxpayers get the excess proceeds.
The major U.S. wireless carriers are slowing streaming video traffic, according to a new report by researchers investigating net neutrality. They add the throttling practices they observed are creating “an unlevel playing field for video streaming providers while also imposing engineering challenges.”
The FCC on Wednesday in a 3-1 party-line vote approved a new rule that would limit what fees local authorities can charge wireless providers as the industry builds out its next-generation networks, known as 5G.
Small cell 5G gear will no longer need federal environmental and historic reviews. The change is meant to lower costs and speed deployment of next-gen networks.
The U.S. Supreme Court today takes up a major test of privacy rights in the digital age as it weighs whether police must obtain warrants to get data on the past locations of criminal suspects using cellphone data from wireless providers.
By now, most broadcasters should be quite familiar with the FCC’s 10 phases for repacking television spectrum. Karl Voss, chief engineer of KAET Phoenix, says they better get up to speed fast on what he calls “Phase Zero” — any channel in 600 MHz or above that is not protected.
The biggest spenders in the FCC’s $19.8 billion TV spectrum incentive auction were T-Mobile with $8 billion, satellite TV company Dish Network at $6.2 billion and Comcast with $1.7 billion.
The cable giant plans to create a cellphone service that would run on its 15 million Wi-Fi hotspots and use Verizon’s wireless network, which it has a deal to resell.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler suggested that wireless carriers that are being coy about how much they will participate in next year’s incentive auction of 600 MHz broadcast TV spectrum are simply positioning themselves and trying to throw off their competitors from discerning their true intentions.
The broadcast incentive auction hasn’t even been held yet, but the wireless industry is worried that there will be no new spectrum in the pipeline after the final gavel falls.
Wireless Carriers: Next-Gen TV’s Big Obstacle
While work is progressing on developing ATSC 3.0, the next-gen broadcast TV standard that stations hope will let them deliver signals to all digital media devices, a roadblock looms. To get the tech included in smartphones will require the OK of the wireless carriers and while have no incentive to allow broadcasters into the phones, they have considerable incentive to keep them out.