Mangle my access...
It’s a perennial question amongst Mobile InterWeb users – is my Mobile Operator of choice fiddling with my access to the wider InterWeb?
Recent IT news suggested that Orange was blocking access to The Pirate Bay (which itself doesn’t seem to have been out of the news this year!), but it turns out that was purely a routing issue.
However, browsing on most Mobile devices has been subject to some transcoding for years now, and also most Operators would admit there is some (however subtle) keyword/content checking going on, for content of questionable legality.
Another level on which Mobile Operators have been affecting the content that we can receive on Mobile devices is at the pure data level – since mobile networks are relatively constrained with bandwidth resources, it makes sense that users/cells are targeted for bandwidth throttling.
Of course, on the fixed line Internet the focus has been strongly at the data-level for the last 18 months, with both the increases in (HD) video streaming being exponential, and in parallel, the bandwidth-shaping and monitoring performed by (particularly) the ISPs.
What I am interested in though is whether you find your access is blocked off in certain areas, transcoded, modified, or other – if there are enough comments I’ll pick this up in to a series of posts where we can see who the best/worst (non-)offenders are, and offer up some user-experiences from our esteemed readership!
[Original story via: Tech Digest]