How much of this is due to in places with cheap wireless offering zero rating won't be as effective at attracting customers as it would be in a place with expensive wireless, hence you are more likely to see it offered in places with expensive wireless?
For instance, T-Mobile's "Music Freedom" zero-rates a whole bunch of music streaming services. In the US, where data is expensive, that could easily cause someone to pick T-Mobile over one of the other providers, if they listen to a lot of music. With "Music Choice" I can get by on the smallest data plan. Without it, I'd have to step up, maybe even to unlimited.
In a country where data is cheap, something like "Music Freedom" wouldn't make much difference, and so I could see less ISPs bothering with the technical and administrative overhead of having such a program.
This is putting the cart before the horse. Competition is what drives down prices. When companies aren't allowed to zero rate content then they're all offering more or less the same product so they have to compete with each other on price.
Also keep in mind that zero rating is itself an explicit admission that network capacity and overhead aren't factors in the price. The whole deal is that the wireless company lets customers on those plans use unlimited data at no extra charge as long as it's for zero rated content. Allowing customers at that same price point to use that same unlimited data without arbitrary restrictions would ultimately be just as profitable.
Isn't low speed steady traffic easier for the network to handle than bursty high speed traffic? Someone streaming music for 8 hours will use about a gigabyte of data total but only needs a 256 kbits/second connection. The network could deliver that over older 3g infrastructure.
The same thing could be accomplished without zero-rating if they made their data plans something like N gig of high speed data and unlimited low speed data, and then the phones provided some way for applications to specify whether a given connection should use high speed data or low speed data.
For some applications that would be easier for the developer. Music streaming apps could always ask for a low speed connection. But what about file download apps? Whether they should use my limited high speed data or my unlimited low speed data is probably not something the app can determine on its own, because it depends on how much of a hurry I'm in. So a lot of apps would probably need to expose this decision making to the user.
That wouldn't have any net neutrality issues, but I bet it would be a UI nightmare.
(Actually a lot of carriers do kind of do that. A lot of unlimited plans are N gigs high speed unlimited low speed, except rather than trying to optimize which is used on a per connection basis it simply uses high speed until you've run out and then uses low speed for the rest of the month).
>Also keep in mind that zero rating is itself an explicit admission that network capacity and overhead aren't factors in the price.
No, that's not what that means. You can easily take special means to get direct peering to zero rated partners or install CDNs so that zero rated traffic does have any impact on peering links. Congestion at the last mile is only a small part of what an ISP deals with.
For wireless carriers it’s all about the last mile. You can only get a certain amount of data within a certain amount of spectrum. Yeah I know I’m butchering the explanation. It’s been over 20 years since I studied it.
If zero rating wasn't allowed then the ISP would still be doing that sort of thing with popular content providers anyway, just the ones that their users prefer instead of the ones their users are being railroaded onto by the ISP itself, so as far as I'm concerned it's a wash.
Why is data expensive in the USA? T-Mobile could charge less instead of zero-rating. Why don't they? (Answer: They want to soak businesspeople who can expense more than home/consumer users, and people with obscure Internet hobbies are collateral damage? )
The US is a big ass country with a relatively small population. When you get a data plan from t-mobile, they promise it will work well even in many remote rural areas. That increased coverage has a cost.
You have it all backwards. "Data" isn't a thing that somehow has a natural location-dependent cost. The cost for a mobile provider is infrastructure. They have to buy devices, install them somewhere, and supply them with energy. None of those is in any way inherently much more expensive in the US than in other developed countries. It's only the price that you pay that is expensive, and the reason for that is zero-rating.
For instance, T-Mobile's "Music Freedom" zero-rates a whole bunch of music streaming services. In the US, where data is expensive, that could easily cause someone to pick T-Mobile over one of the other providers, if they listen to a lot of music. With "Music Choice" I can get by on the smallest data plan. Without it, I'd have to step up, maybe even to unlimited.
In a country where data is cheap, something like "Music Freedom" wouldn't make much difference, and so I could see less ISPs bothering with the technical and administrative overhead of having such a program.