Despite Emmys, Road Ahead Is Bumpy for Streaming Services
Linux Insider cited CEI’s Research Fellow and Regulatory Council Ryan Radia on streaming services.
“Wireless networks regularly suffer from congestion, including when too many subscribers connected to the same cellular site try to watch high-definition video at the same time,” said Ryan Radia, research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“Reducing the bandwidth usage of popular streaming video services is one way to manage this congestion to preserve the median user’s mobile broadband experience,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
“Under the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order, which was largely eliminated in early 2018, ISPs were not allowed to selectively degrade particular applications or services — subject to ‘reasonable network management,'” Radia said.
“Whether mobile providers targeting popular video streaming services to deal with congestion would have been engaged in reasonable network management under the FCC’s old rules is up for debate,” he added, “but under current FCC rules, wireless providers are permitted to selectively decrease the bandwidth available to these services, so long as the providers are transparent about it.”