C Spire launches iPhone with different plans for 'streaming' vs 'non-streaming' data

C Spire launches iPhone with different plans for ‘streaming’ vs ‘non-streaming’ data

This is interesting in that it’s a novel distinction: I’ve never heard of a cellular plan with special provisions for ‘streaming’. But it’s also nonsense. There is no such thing as ‘streaming data’. The phrase has no technical meaning.

What most customers considering these plans won’t know is that, at a technical level, there is literally no way to categorise data traffic as streaming or not. Data is data, and ‘streaming’ looks no different to a router than any other kind of download. Do you know how you stream a video on a web page using HTML5? Upload the video file to a server and reference the URL on a page. Same as a download. If you want to offer both ‘streaming’ and ‘downloading’, you use the same URL for both. The browser makes an identical request to the server either way.

The best that this carrier (or anyone) can do is try to figure out which web site the traffic is coming from and classify based on that; e.g., you’re visiting Netflix, so we’ll guess that’s ‘streaming’ –even though you might just be browsing and updating your queue.

The other problem with this method is that the carrier can never know about every web site on the internet that fits their definition of streaming. So they’ll only go after the popular ones. But new web sites become popular all the time, and when this happens, they’ll have to go and find it after it’s already started growing; some customers will have already been using this apparently safe web site when it is suddenly reclassified by the carrier, and then there’s an extra charge, or their connection shuts off, or it’s blocked, or there’s some other unexpected outcome. This is not a good experience.

This page says file downloads are excluded, so there’s that; it doesn’t sound like they’re going based on the actual amount of data used in order to classify streaming. But then we fall further down the rabbit hole:

Listening to Pandora and game broadcasting also counts as streaming.

What the hell is ‘game broadcasting’? This sounds like the kind of surreal language copyright lawyers use to confuse people.

This seems like it could be a nightmare for customers to manage. When you agree to buy a service, you need to know what you’re getting, and you can’t do that if it’s described and enforced with meaningless terms.

But more broadly, this illustrates a larger problem with cellular carriers in the US: they desperately want to remain content providers instead of connectivity providers, by continuing to pretend that things like ‘voice’, ‘data’, ‘text messages’, and now ‘streaming’ are all different things, so that they can convince people they should be charged different prices for them. But to a computer, it’s all just data.