T-Mobile got called out pretty hard when it was discovered they were downscaling videos [0] under the guise of their "Binge On" program. But hidden tracking cookies are far more disturbing that (noticeably) downscaled images/videos. Ultimately, the people are the consumers of images/videos. Who knows who the consumers of that tracking data might be... Obviously advertisers, but who else? The NSA?
That's a very different situation: they didn't downscale anything — the service used traffic shaping which caused most services to fall down to lower bitrates but they weren't altering content, which is why it still applied to HTTPS – and that wasn't a “discovery” as much as “reading the announcement”. The emails and SMS sent to all of their customers first and those messages included the opt-out link.
In contrast, the super-cookies were only discovered by people noticing unexpected headers in the requests their servers were receiving. There was no pre-announcement and it took publicity to get opt-out instructions.
I think they were relying on video services being able to detect available bandwidth and alter the stream to fit. Netflix does this, for example. If you have a narrow connection, you're probably going to get 240p video.
If the streaming service doesn't do this, you just get a terrible experience (buffering... buffering... buffering...).
That's why streaming on bad (narrow, high latency and/or jitter) connections is a bad idea, no? Download in the background, then view, makes much more sense.
On my desktop, I'd rather wait to get the best quality video that I can get. On mobile though, I probably prefer for video to start NOW at a lower bitrate if need be. It will save bandwidth, and battery, and time and the quality is probably good enough.
It's exactly that. I'm sitting in a waiting room or the departure gate at the airport flipping through Twitter or Instagram and a click on a video. I don't need that 6 second video to play in 4K. That it runs instantly is the most important quality, IMHO.
Band 12 is rolling out pretty quickly and is spectrum that allegedly helps with a lot of issues caused by buildings / dense urban environments / long range / etc. I can't confirm personally since I don't own a device that supports LTE band 12 (purchased before TMo bought this spectrum....) but reports seem to be very positive.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles...