Another day, another defense of Binge On from T-Mobile CEO John Legere.
Legere today published an open letter on the T-Mobile website that responds to the largest complaints about Binge On. First, Legere says that T-Mobile uses “proprietary techniques” to detect video, determine the source (so they know if its a free streaming partner) and then “adjust all streams for a smaller/handheld device.” Legere makes no mention of the EFF report that says that T-Mobile is just detecting all video content — streams and downloads — and reducing the speeds to 1.5Mbps. T-Mobile told the EFF that reducing bandwidth is the only thing that Binge On does to video content.
The T-Mobile CEO then explains why Binge On is automatically enabled for everyone rather than being opt-in. He says that T-Mobile wants all of its customer services to default to being on and that if the other carriers had Binge On, they’d make it opt-in in the hopes that customers wouldn’t activate it.
Legere goes on to say that Binge On is pro net neutrality because customers can toggle it on and off whenever they’d like. Finally, he apologizes for his remarks about the EFF during his Twitter Q&A last week (“Who the f*** are you anyway, EFF?”) and says that T-Mobile wants to meet with the group to discuss Binge On.
In his open letter, John Legere doesn’t seem to offer up much in the way of new information on how Binge On works or why it’s opt-out and not opt-in. He argues that the traditional carriers would make it opt-in and hope that customers don’t turn it on, but the same argument could be made about T-Mobile’s decision to make it opt-out. By automatically enabling it for everyone, lots of folks probably won’t know that it’s on and so they won’t know to turn it off, resulting in a lighter load on T-Mobile’s network. Legere says that he doesn’t want customers to have to hunt down the switch to enable Binge On, but the switch to turn it off isn’t the easiest thing to find.
Where do you stand on Binge On and T-Mobile’s implementation of the service?