"On certain plans, we may prioritize your data behind other traffic."

"Textured Soy Protein" (texturedsoyprotein) 07/13/2018 at 11:28 • Filed to: None

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I’ve been on the cheap prepaid phone plan bandwagon for the past few years. Unfortunately, my move from a small/medium city to a much larger one, and my new job in a particularly congested area, have me bumping into the wireless carriers’ latest trick to get you to spend more money with them: data deprioritization.

In the never-ending quest to come up with new and different ways to nickel and dime customers, all the wireless carriers have moved toward “unlimited” data plans that aren’t really unlimited anyway, and have assorted restrictions on how much data you can use before you’re throttled within an inch of your life, or video quality, or hotspot access, or whatever. None of the options are good.

Me, I use my phone a lot, but generally I’ve never used a ton of mobile data. I’d be on wifi at home, at work, and at the gym, and those are the places where I spend the majority of my time. For a couple years, it was better for me to get a plan with a specific data cap rather than an “unlimited” plan, as long as there were less speed/priority restrictions on the data until hitting the cap.

Unfortunately, the party couldn’t last, because :

The wireless carriers are increasingly closing the throttling-free loopholes of data capped in-house prepaid or MVNO plans, and instead, your data traffic is given lower priority on their networks. Usually this happens, “in times of congestion.”

I moved from Madison, WI to the Washington, DC area, my new job is in a permanently congested area, and because of the industry I’m in, my company is subject to assorted audits and other stuff where I at least   try to do my personal internet usage to my phone’s data plan, not the company wifi.

The two speed tests you see above were done two minutes apart, both sitting at my desk. The 2.17 Mbps result o n the left is my Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge on Verizon in-house prepaid. The 16.4 Mbps result o n the right is my work-issued iPhone 6S, on Verizon post-paid (I don’t even really know what plan my company has on this thing) connected to the same Verizon tower, and the same Speedtest.net server.

Sometimes on prepaid I’ll get higher speeds than this, but it can also easily be even worse. B ecause my office is in a busy area, there’s no rhyme nor reason to if and when I’ll be throttled. Here’s what Verizon says about this:

On certain plans, we may prioritize your data behind other traffic. If the cell site you are connected to begins experiencing high demand during the duration of your session, your data speeds may be slower than the other traffic’s. Once the demand on the site lessens, or if you connect to a different site not experiencing high demand, your speed will return to normal.

The demand is never going to lessen. It’s only going to get worse because there are like 5 more office buildings being built down the street from my mine. Even my work phone on Verizon post-paid has garbage upload speeds, but also since it’s my work phone I’m not doing any personal stuff on it anyway and leave it connected to the work wifi, except to use it as a point of comparison for crappy prepaid service quality.

When I first started this job, I was on T-Mobile prepaid, which generally T-Mobile doesn’t throttle much, if at all. If you want a cheaper in-house T-Mobile prepaid option, they own MetroPCS, which does get deprioritized vs. T-Mobile prepaid. But the T-Mobile signal just couldn’t reliably get in to this building. I’d be texting with my wife, then go to the break room to get coffee, and the break room is a T-Mobile dead spot. Even at my desk which is pretty close to an exterior wall, the T-Mobile signal would go in and out periodically, and the phone would get hot trying to maintain a good connection.

I took an informal poll of folks at my office and Verizon appeared to have the best coverage in the building. Plus, my work phone was on Verizon so I figured it’d work fine. First I switched to Boom Mobile, which is a newer Verizon MVNO. The reason I went with them was they’re one of the few Verizon MVNOs that do VoLTE calling for simultaneous voice & data. They also have nice, generally pretty decent, US-based customer service. It’s not 24 hour coverage but their customer service reps are generally good.

I know Boom customer service is good, because I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why I was only able to make VoLTE calls in and around my office about 25% of the time. They went through a couple different rounds of trying to fix it, but long story short, there was no technical issue with the account that they could fix. Being an MVNO, Boom data traffic is deprioritized by Verizon to an extreme amount, where the phone sees such low data speeds that it falls back to a CDMA call with no data available .

While the Verizon versions of some older phones like the LG G2 had a trick where they could do CDMA voice and LTE data at the same, most current phones only do simultaneous voice & data on Verizon when making a VoLTE call. Since I have a long-ass commute home thanks to DC traffic, I would often use the time to catch up on whatever phone calls I need to make to family, customer service with companies, etc. My phone stays in a dash mount in my car and I’d do little stuff with it while crawling through traffic like find an email with an order number, or put something on my calendar for my grandma’s birthday while my crazy aunt talks herself in circles about when that birthday might be celebrated.

After that, I switched to Verizon in-house prepaid because they’re running a double data cap deal on prepaid plans. But, the situation hasn’t really improved. VoLTE, while not perfect, seems to be at least some what more reliable than on Boom. But my data is still being throttled on a regular basis.

All I want is to quickly flick through Instagram or other non-work-related internet things on my phone and have those things load in a reasonable amount of time. But it looks like the only way for me to achieve that is to either hop on to the wifi at work, or pay a bunch more money for a post-paid plan.

Stupid wireless carriers, you done got me good with this congestion throttling ! If only there were !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . Oh well.

Azrek > Textured Soy Protein 07/13/2018 at 11:42

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My phone can autoconnect to any Open Wifi. It is kinda silly, so I am always leaking and lurking on peoples’ interwebs! 

Sampsonite24-Earth's Least Likeliest Hero > Textured Soy Protein 07/13/2018 at 12:00

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Ive been Verizon post paid for almost a decade and while it's expensive and I've got a 10 GB data cap the speed and coverage are worth it

BoxerFanatic, troublesome iconoclast. > Textured Soy Protein 07/13/2018 at 12:05

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Cell companies struggle with all the data bandwidth across their airwave bandwidth, and try to offload it on terrestrial fiber optic transport wherever and whenever they can... without actually commensurately reimbursing those network operators in most circumstances for their additional bandwidth load.

And where they can’t offload directly onto fiber, they try to push client devices onto WiFi, again, onto networks other than their own.

The saving grace of QoS and data de-prioritization, is that data traffic is TCP, not UDP.

Transmission Control Protocol, in association with Internet Protocol, will have the sender IP address re-transmit packets, if some packets fail checksum verification, or don’t arrive at the receiving end IP addressed device . A slow data connection will be slow... but eventually the data will populate, unless the connection times out entirely.

UDP, however, (User Datagram Protocol), or a form of that, RTP (Real-t ime Transport Protocol), does not do any of that error or sequence checking, and can degrade and fail after much shorter periods of time, in milliseconds to nanoseconds.

Video and Audio that is time sensitive is usually transmitted through UDP/RTP bitstreams. If packets get lost or corrupted, they simply are absent, and usually are so small, and fast that any one or small group of packets missing, are barely noticeable as a video or audio artifact. O nly larger groups of missing packets are noticeable as digital effects, such as video pixelization, audio decompression errors such as tinny sound, lat ency echos, etc. They become noticeable as quality degradation. Long outages of UDP/RTP traffic will cause a time-out and loss of stream. That is when your video halts , or your phone call gets dropped.

Cell companies have a vested interest in prioritizing voice traffic, followed closely by other UDP traffic, such as video. TCP data traffic can wait longer, get re-transmitted, and still get the result with more latency than UDP can tolerate.

And with so many users pumping so many IP packets through their finite radio bandwidth, cell companies are always looking for ways to balance that traffic, and monetize it, and offload as much as they can, to allow as much other traffic through as can’t be offloaded.

The physics of Electromagnetic radiation, which is what radio waves are, are finite, it is all digital trickery to get it to do as much as possible, in that finite, and interference-susceptible bandwidth.

Source: I work in the telecommunications and information technology industries.

Textured Soy Protein > Sampsonite24-Earth's Least Likeliest Hero 07/13/2018 at 12:20

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The problem I have is Verizon has the best coverage at my office but there’s no good plan option on Verizon’s network.

MVNO - cheap, enough data, ridiculous congestion throttling.

Verizon in-house prepaid - multi-line discount and double data deal make it cheap, and enough data; slightly less ridiculous congestion throttling.

Verizon post-paid with data cap - the biggest data cap is 8 GB before you get kicked up to “unlimited” plan options. Adding lines doesn’t get you more data. 

Verizon Go “Unlimited ” - subject to deprioritization like prepaid, hotspot throttled to 600 Kbps.

All I want is a 2-line plan that’s not subject to congestion throttling, but to do that with Verizon I’d have to get the spend $160/month plus taxes and fees for their Beyond “Unlimited” plan.   Compare that to the assorted prepaid plans I’ve put my and my wife’s phones on, where we’ve basically never spent more than $100/month.

Textured Soy Protein > BoxerFanatic, troublesome iconoclast. 07/13/2018 at 12:24

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I know there’s some physical limitations at work here, but I have a hard time believing the extent to which prepaid (and now even some postpaid “unlimited”) data traffic is slowed down is what’s necessary for optimizing the network for everyone.

Switching from my current Verizon prepaid plan to a postpaid one not subject to deprioritization would cost 2x as much. Why does the postpaid phone get 8x the data speed in a congested area? 

BoxerFanatic, troublesome iconoclast. > Textured Soy Protein 07/13/2018 at 13:20

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Some of that is pure marketing and revenue generation. They know that pre-paid plans are basically revenue capped subscribers that they are not going to make any more revenue off of... and are already discounted, and paying much less monthly recurring revenue, which funds network maintenance and infrastructure support.

P repaid subscriber counts exist somewhat to claim those cellular voice lines, and they have their growth/sales numbers for SEC reporting and stock valuation... they know they aren’t going to get much more from those customers beyond that, because those customers are pre-paying due to budgetary concerns or willingly knowing that they are low-usage customers... most are bargain shoppers, and sometimes unfortunately get treated as such.

Post-paid subscribers are paying contracts usually, or at least higher Monthly Recurring charges, and are more mainstream cellular customers, who turn over hardware more often, which they make a margin on also, and who also tend to both have higher service expectations, and more willingness to pay their charges, or upgrade if their demands exceed their service levels, so they can try to up- sell.

They are also more likely in urban areas, to jump between carriers, and port their numbers around, to get better deals and service levels when they do change their hardware every couple of years . Cell companies and satellite and big cable TV providers know that, and circular customer migration shows as conquest sales, which also somewhat fictitiously bolster s their financial growth figures and corporate stock values... big companies are all motivated by Sarbannes-Oxley to report quarterly growth over sound financial fundamentals.

The higher prices are justified by higher service levels and talking points... hardware discount incentives, more frequent eligibility to upgrade hardware, and up-sale opportunities for higher service level limits...

Even their unlimited plans are not unlimited. They are “unlimited” until a certain data limit is reached, then throttled... rather than incurring up-charges per megabyte of data over their limit... which makes for a slightly higher margin every month, but avoids angry customers with spiking bills when their kids forget to turn the WiFi on, and watch a month of Netflix on their cellular data plan from inside their house... when they should have been on WiFi. Or sometimes the parent forgets to turn the WiFi back on, and the kid wasn’t the one doing it...

I don’t work in the cellular side. I work for a small, independent terrestrial network provider, we don’t throttle, we don’t cap then up-charge on data volume, we only sell data bandwidth speed levels.

I see how big telecom providers treat their customers... cellular, satellite, and terrestrial... sometimes it is a technical limitation, sometimes it is competing for limited subscriber revenue availability, but sometimes it is not at all what I would do, in terms of customer service.

I am thankful to work for a small-town, ethically-acting terrestrial network provider, and can take pride in the subscription services we offer, and the customer support we do provide to the neighbors we know in our small communities. I have worked for a bigger provider, and the atmosphere wasn’t nearly as positive, and good-service for a fair price.

Textured Soy Protein > BoxerFanatic, troublesome iconoclast. 07/13/2018 at 13:45

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All telecom sectors do this stuff with their pricing in one way or another. The problem I have is the wireless providers are not servicing the lower price brackets fairly.

I have Verizon FiOS internet at my house. I happily pay for the lower cost, 100 Mbps service because the higher cost 1 Gbps option doesn’t really do anything for me that 100 Mbps doesn’t. I’m a nice little piece of easy recurring revenue for them.

Other home internet companies, they might have lower speed tiers, like 25 Mbps, 60 Mbps, whatever, where people choose those lower options based on price. But they’re at least getting consistent service.

This congestion throttling though, there’s no predictability to it. There’s no way for the customer to know what to expect. If I’m in a less busy area, I might have perfectly acceptable data speeds, but go somewhere where a bunch of other people are trying to use the same tower, and throttling kicks in.

That 2.17 Mbps that I got above? That’s a good result for prepaid around my office. But get some congestion on the network and it all goes to hell. I just got 0.56 Mbps on my personal phone and 1.78 Mbps on my work phone .

I suppose I should just give up and put my personal phone on the work wifi.

BoxerFanatic, troublesome iconoclast. > Textured Soy Protein 07/13/2018 at 15:21

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I would definitely put your personal phone on guest WiFi at your work, if they offer it.

Some companies have security considerations for not putting employee cell phones on corporate LAN accessible WiFi.

25, 50, 100, 1000mbps per subscriber means nothing if there isn’t either the consistent wireless bandwidth, or better yet, the terrestrial network infrastructure to support those speeds with the volume of subscribers involved...

Wireless is a shared-backhaul network, just like Docsys over Coax, DSL, or PON (passive optical network)

That is why the company I work for uses active ethernet optical fiber to the premises. Dedicated fiber line directly from our distribution switches to the customer’s demark point, unaffected by weather or EM interference, 1Gbps capable per customer, at the speed of light, over many miles distance. Reliability and consistency is not even a comparison against copper, let alone against radio.

But with any network, it is only as strong as it’s weakest link, both in terms of bandwidth, and redundancy.

I live in my own service area. I could turn my house up to 1Gbps, and test from my office to my house, and get within a few mbps of that speed, if the test equipment is up for it. we are Gig-certified and could do that for any optical terminal on our network.

No company, no matter how big or small, has internet backbone access at 1Gbps x subscriber count, though... that bandwidth doesn’t exist, and would be WAY beyond affordable for subscribers to bear the cost of.

Most people with high-bandwidth FTTP/FTTH use a fraction of it’s capability at any given time. I don’t even use all of mine when streaming 4K-HDR video in one room, 720P video-over-IP in another room, multiple internet devices actively browsing, maybe even a second internet video stream, and a landline VoIP call in progress, and computers running cloud sync and maintenance updates, all at the same time. And that almost never happens at the same time.

Network providers monitor their trunk uplink aggregate bandwidth, and the good ones keep theirs updated to provide a little overhead, or a burstable connection to accommodate peak times of data usage for their subscriber pool as a whole.... and don’t let it become the limitation.

We have a main and a backup backhaul trunk, into which each subscriber has their own connection,

Wireless, DSL, Docsys, and PON are further distributed, and have multiple backhaul segments, from your nearest tower or sub-station, everyone on that node shares the backhaul to the next stage, where multiple nodes share a backhaul further up-stream. Some nodes are only as big as a neighborhood, maybe a city block, or a tower’s broadcast radius, or a DSL telephone cabinet’s copper cable density or transmission distance limitations.

If your NODE only has 100-200Mbps backhaul , you’ll not get more than that, and you’ll have to share it with every other user’s instantaneous demand on that node.

Even if you have 1Gbps to your node, and your node has 1Gbps upstream to it’s next hop... you still share that 1Gbps backhaul, and the only way you’ll get it, is if no one else is using any at the time.

If there are 10 subscribers on your node, each with 100mbps, and the node has a 1Gbps backhaul, theoretically there is enough to share, and everyone could simultaneously utilize 100mbps, but if each of you had 250mbps subscriptions, you would only get your full bandwidth if someone else is under-utilizing theirs, which at that level is very likely. E verybody having 25mbps, sharing 100mbps backhaul, and trying to use Netflix, is a much more likely case of congestion.

With businesses it isn’t much different... some businesses barely use more than some website traffic, and may only need 5-10Mbps. Other businesses share databases and huge file transfers, offsite backups, and other things, especially UPLOAD intensive things, that greatly congest network nodes.

Almost everything other than fiber optic has much lower upload capabilities than download... because lower and finite bandwidth levels are skewed for download availability which is more commonly used, and most customer network endpoints (DSL modems, Cellular or WiFi radio chipsets Docsys modems, etc...) aren’t as strong at transmitting upstream as the network distribution equipment is at transmitting downstream. The network endpoints can receive a stronger signal from the distribution equipment better than they can transmit.

Bandwidth sharing also  only counts on your node. Someone under-utilizing their connection on a different node across town... d oesn’t matter if everyone on your node over-utilizing your node’s backhaul. Your node still slows down, even if every other node in town is under-utilized. The bottleneck is closer to your endpoint, rather than closer to the main trunk.

The bandwidth limitation for wireless is environmental, radio signal availability minus interference (which solar and atmospheric conditions can affect, as well as aberrant radio emissions from other non-telecom radio emission sources.), as well as limited by the backhaul capacity of that radio tower being able to handle all of the station devices simultaneously. That trunk line gets full, and it is all going to slow down, just like a high radio noise floor, or signal interference causing re-transmission of packets.

Even if your device and the tower are speaking at full bitrate, if something is interfering and garbling the TCP data packets, it will keep going back and forth until all the data packets are accounted for, and all of them check against the checksum... or until the timeout when it stops trying, and starts all over again. A speed test will be similarly affected, even with a good RSI score, if the data is corrupted, it has to be checked and re-transmitted, which takes much more time and latency.

Textured Soy Protein > BoxerFanatic, troublesome iconoclast. 07/13/2018 at 15:49

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There’s a guest wifi that’s silo ed away from being able to access anything sensitive on the network. I resist connecting to it because then it might be monitored anyway. It’s not that hard to identify a particular device on the network. I dunno, maybe I’m being paranoid.

My office is in Tyson’s Corner, VA which is very full of people in offices, but this is not some new phenomenon where the cellular carriers have been caught off guard. It’s been like this for a long time. They could build the capacity if they wanted.

I know that generally you may not always get the maximum service speed for the reasons you suggested. All I’m saying is that I would hope the network would be a little kinder to the customers it’s throttling, where their connections at least, for the most part, work as intended. But that’s only true of the post-paid phone’s traffic.

Rico > Textured Soy Protein 07/13/2018 at 19:25

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Just bite the bullet and get a Verizon post paid account. You’re clearly making more money at this job in DC than Wisconsin, I think it’s time to ditch the prepaid stuff and treat yourself to the real deal. The only time I was on a prepaid cell plan was when I was 16 (Boost mobile where you at!)

Rico > Textured Soy Protein 07/13/2018 at 19:28

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How stupid is that gap Fios has between 100 mbps and 1 gbps it’s like a $70 difference!

Textured Soy Protein > Rico 07/14/2018 at 10:00

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Hey, living in DC ain’t cheap. Housing costs a lot more than Madison. Gas (which I’m burning a lot more of), groceries , etc are all more.

But really it just comes down to the wireless carriers kee p finding new and different ways for postpaid plans and phone subsidies to suck more, so a few years ago I switched to unlocked phones and prepaid plans.

I suppose I can get past my paranoia about connecting to the wifi at work, but this data deprioritization is so damn annoying. Last night m y wife and I were talking about going to see a movie. I called her on my way out of the office park (it’s not really an office park, just a dense area of office towers, but I don’t know what else to call it) to talk about our plans, but the call dropped down to CDMA so I had no background data. What time’s the movie showing? Fuck if I know.

A couple weeks ago, we were on our way out to the eastern shore of Maryland to see my folks at their vacation house, and my wife forgot to bring a medication with her. We were already too far from home to pick it up, and it’s often not in stock when she gets it refilled but we decided to try to find a pharmacy in the biggest town on the way to the shore with the stuff in stock. We were waiting in traffic to get on the Chesapeake Bay bridge, just trying to use our phones to pull up the phone number for pharmacies, doctors, etc. And because we were sitting in a pile of traffic, neither of our phones data would work at all. It got so bad that the Google app on my phone would give me an error message like, “you’re offline right now, do you want a notification when the connection is restored and your search result is ready?” That worked... eventually.

T-Mobile didn’t throttle the hell out of their prepaid data like this, but T-Mobile also can’t get their signal in to the interior of my office building, or have anything resembling decent coverage out by that vacation house.

I’m not going to fuck with Sprint, but I might hop back over to something riding on AT&T’s network. Only problem is it’s hard to avoid throttling with them too.

Rico > Textured Soy Protein 07/14/2018 at 12:30

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Damn one of the things I hated about CDMA carriers was the lack of data/voice if the signal dropped down from LTE. I have T-Mobile which doesn’t do penetration well but so far works for my case. ATT is a bust where I am and obviously Verizon while being the most solid is also the most vile lol. I know work WiFi sucks and I usually avoid it myself. Carriers have their heads up their ass and are on their way back to “unlimited nights and weekends” levels of stupid.

Maybe since your job has a Verizon account there might be an opportunity for an employer discount? Might be worth asking about.

Please stay far away from Sprint. They are literally the worst!