Verizon Wireless wants to throttle you (actually your data usage)

This could be a good experience for Verizon iPhone users.

Having all photo and video served "locally" gives even poor web servers and overseas web servers the possibility of getting Akamai quality delivery.

The two exceptions where it will be bad:

It won't allow full resolution photos to be saved to the camera roll with the iPhone "save image" feature of Mobile Safari, and zooming in on high res. images like subway maps in Mobile Safari may be worse if they are "optimized" to unreadable.


It also puts the pressure on a single (server farm) point of failure.

A lot of untested questions here. Will the local cache be faster than the direct links? Will they have caching mistakes? Will it survive an attack (distributed denial of service, etc) on the optimizer servers? How quickly can they drop the optimizers out of the pipeline when a problem arises?


What does this mean for the Wi-Fi Hotspot feature?

Will the optimizer recognize the resolution of the browser on the computer connected to the iPhone, or will it still optimize photos and video for the iPhone providing the hotspot?

Will it recognize that the computer can and will want to buffer video much deeper than the iPhone, or will it downgrade high quality video and slow delivery of low quality video to "just in time" (real time rather than as quickly as possible)?

Its kind of funny that noone apparently remembers how ultra crappy AT&T's network was when the iPhone first came out. There was no talk and surf compatibility back then and the upgrade to the 3G network was laughable at best. You paid for 3G service when you could only connect to edge. No all the AT&T-philes are calling out everyone that switched to VZW as bootlickers? Seriously? AT&T has horrific customer service and their network is at best....passable. On any given day, I drop atleast 3 calls, and sometimes I only MAKE 3 calls a day. I'm familiar with Apple Fanbois, but AT&T Fanbois? Get serious.

LOL! Degrade the quality of text?.

>Hey John what's up?
nog<
>What was that?
ng<
>I can't undertand you, what are you trying to say?
stp vez msg up tex i gt iphn<
>Oh you got the iphone on verizon?
y<
>Wow they really cutting back on the bandwith huh.
y<
>So how is it compared to at&t?
i<
ms<
att<
>lol I see you found a way around the throttle eh?
fr<
now<
>lol
l<

I hope verizon doesn't have to snoop that low to handle the iphone. That would be hilarious. Now AT&T can reedit those ads where they all got the message first. Maybe photoshop verizon logo's on to the other guys phones.

I dumped VZW right after the iPhone was announced in 2007. . . no regrets.
No plans to go back.

I hope they aren't compressing image or video files I want to upload to my DropBox account from my camera's SD card (I use a device called ZoomMediaPlus, a SD card reader for the iPhone and iPad.) This would suck.

I've been with three major carriers. They are all basically out to screw you somehow.

I am sticking with AT&T while Verizon's own 'gotchas' become apparent. My guess is that there will be a lot of movement back and forth between the two over the next year or two. With a lot of regret no matter where you go.

Well, I'm really in a quandary about this.I have had an iPhone AT&T for the past three years and suffice to say the network coverage in my area is less than optimal. We switched from Verizon and I was glad to escape the heavy-handed tactics of Verizon locking phones, crippling interfaces and loading up crapware. But the coverage is much better than AT&T.

But the fact is I need my phone to work like, well - a phone. I've found that I'm consuming a lot less data on my phone now that I have my iPad. But I loathe Verizon and if it weren't for their network, I wouldn't even entertain the thought.

This is SO typical of Verizon.

[sigh] what to do . . . ?

Well, I guess if I had to say one thing, it would probably be...I dunno...



AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

A study done a couple of years ago showed that, while phones have really improved, phone SERVICE has pretty much stayed the same. Sure, you can slap up repeaters all over the place, but that traffic has to get processed somewhere. And it's in the same substations as it always has been.

The ones I pity are those that never had an iPhone because they were waiting for Verizon. What you're going to find is that you waited three years for principle, not performance.

But all you "I are leaving teh AT&T cuz they are sux0rs" kool-aid slurpers...good luck. And that's just that many fewer people on the network.

So...basically, Verizon handed out phones to reviewers so they could have the best experience possible and review the phone/system combo as such...and ahead of actual customers having them, are "pre-emptively" putting in a scheme of data degradation? :)

Yeah. That's the VZW I remember working for :)

-K

Wow, so all web (HTTP on port 80) traffic goes through the "optimizer" process which compresses, transcodes, or caches all text, image, and video data.

It's mind boggling to think that the processing and storage resources required to do all of that still make it the most cost-effective way to effectively increase the available bandwidth on their network.