Since T-Mobile announced Binge On last month at an Uncarrier event in Los Angeles, there’s been quite a few reports about T-Mobile throttling video data traffic on their network, whether the service is part of Binge On or not. And there’s also word that it’s happening on WiFi as well. Luckily there is a way to turn off Binge On, although that doesn’t seem to solve the problem for everyone.
There was a report that came out stating that T-Mobile is throttling YouTube’s videos as well, when played on their network. Even though YouTube isn’t part of Binge On. DSLReports spoke with T-Mobile about the “throttling” issue and they had this to say:
“Using the term “throttle” is misleading. We aren’t slowing down YouTube or any other site. In fact, because video is optimized for mobile devices, streaming from these sites should be just as fast, if not faster than before. A better phrase is “mobile optimized” or a less flattering “downgraded” is also accurate.”
In other words, T-Mobile has mobile optimized YouTube videos. And the most likely reasoning for this is to stop wasting data. By optimizing video, T-Mobile can save a ton of data and have more people on their network costing them less money and bandwidth. It’s smart on T-Mobile’s part, but it looks like they need to bump the quality up to at least 720p. As many are complaining about the quality of the video, and all the buffering. For instance, with Hulu, now the commercials buffer about every other second (not even kidding) something that didn’t happen before Binge On.
T-Mobile is optimizing all video on their network, it appears. Luckily you can turn off Binge On by heading into My T-Mobile (the desktop site). Then clicking on Profile, and Multimedia Settings. It doesn’t get rid of all of the issues, but it does help with videos being lower quality and slower. Like with Music Freedom, Binge On is hitting a few snags in the early going. It’ll likely get better in the next few months, but for right now it’s not as great as T-Mobile’s executives led us to believe it would be.