Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile And Sprint Face Throttling Questions From Senators

November 19, 2018

A trio of Democratic senators are raising questions about nationwide carriers’ data-throttling practices.

“We write to express our concern that mobile carriers may be inappropriately throttling and prioritizing internet traffic from common mobile apps without the knowledge of their customers,” wrote Sens. Edward Markey, D-Mass., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in their letter addressed to the CEOs of AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint. The senators’ full letter is available here. “All online traffic should be treated equally, and internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise.”

The senators pointed to research from the Wehe testing platform, news of which has surfaced before, that found evidence of throttling by all four carriers on video services ranging from YouTube to Netflix to Amazon Prime.

As noted in a lengthy article on the topic by Ars Technica, Verizon and T-Mobile didn’t immediately respond to questions on the topic, while Sprint said it would look into the matter.

Indeed, Sprint has been previously implicated in Skype throttling allegations by the Wehe testing platform, which is essentially an iOS and Android app developed by researchers at Northeastern University that users can download to test potential throttling situations.

Read more at FierceWireless

^