The reason it works is because telecom providers use DNS-based throttling instead of deep packet inspection to selectively limit bandwidth to video sites. They have a massive list of all the popular streaming sites (YouTube, AppleTV, Netflix, etc.) and then throttle the sites in the list. When providers say “unlimited 480p video streaming” they actually have no clue what video quality you are watching. They just pick a bandwidth limitation that would only allow 480p video to play without buffering.
They could in theory use network traffic analysis to identify video websites which have bursty bandwidth patterns (due to the nature of video buffers), but this would be more difficult, more expensive, and extremely prone to false positives.
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The reason it works is because telecom providers use DNS-based throttling instead of deep packet inspection to selectively limit bandwidth to video sites. They have a massive list of all the popular streaming sites (YouTube, AppleTV, Netflix, etc.) and then throttle the sites in the list. When providers say “unlimited 480p video streaming” they actually have no clue what video quality you are watching. They just pick a bandwidth limitation that would only allow 480p video to play without buffering.
They could in theory use network traffic analysis to identify video websites which have bursty bandwidth patterns (due to the nature of video buffers), but this would be more difficult, more expensive, and extremely prone to false positives.