BingeOn Under the Microscope
Arash Molavi Kakhki, Fangfan Li, David Choffnes, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Alan Mislove · 2016
The popularity of mobile devices for ubiquitous Internet access has led to exploding demand for relatively scarce cellular bandwidth. As a result, cellular operators increasingly turn to creative ways to manage their customers’ demand on capacity, using traffic shaping and transcoding and zero-rating. With zero-rating, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) do not charge users for traffic sent to/from certain services, often because those services agree to use limited bandwidth resources. Perhaps the most well-publicized of case in the U.S. is T-Mobile’s “BingeOn ” service, which zero-rates video streams from a large number of partner sites. In this paper, we address this issue by conducting a case study of T-Mobile’s zero-rating policy to understand its implications for users and content providers in terms of data quota, performance, and QoE. We focus on T-Mobile and BingeOn due to their recent controversy, but we believe that lessons learned from this exercise will readily apply to other carriers using similar technologies to implement their policies.