WeHe, does your provider slow down some services?

This is a text automatically translated from Italian. If you appreciate our work and if you like reading it in your language, consider a donation to allow us to continue doing it and improving it.

Have you ever wondered if your provider, the company that provides you with your internet connection, limits your connection in some way? It certainly wouldn't be new and it's not always easy to find out, but thanks to WeHe you might be able to understand if your provider specifically slows down some services in favor of others.

For example, it may happen that a provider specifically slows down a certain service for various reasons. This practice has a name and is called throttling ¹ and that's generally one of the reasons why it might be useful install and use a VPN. With a VPN the only traffic that your provider will see will be through the VPN server but even in this case you will not be safe from any slowdowns: the provider could in fact decide to slow down all connections to the VPN servers ².

WeHe is an application that tries to understand whether or not your provider is slowing down traffic to certain services. It is an application developed by researchers at Northeastern University ³ and the data collected anonymously will be used to create statistics divided by ISP (provider), by country and by app.

How does WeHe work?

To understand how WeHe works we will translate the technical part described on their site: Wehe uses your device to exchange Internet traffic recorded by real and popular applications such as YouTube And Spotify, making it appear that you are using such applications. As a result, if an Internet Service Provider (ISP) tries to slow down YouTube, Wehe would see the same behavior. We then send the internet traffic of the same app, but replacing the contents with randomized bytes, which prevent ISPs from classifying traffic as belonging to the app. Our hypothesis is that randomized traffic will not cause application-specific differentiation by the ISP (e.g., throttling or blocking), while original traffic will. We repeat these tests several times to exclude disturbances due to poor network conditions and to ultimately tell you if your ISP is giving different performance to an application's network traffic.

When you open the application you can choose what type of test to carry out by selecting different applications divided into three categories: Video, Music And Conferencing:

• Video: Disney+, Facebook Video, Hulu, NBC Sports, Netflix, Prime Video, Twitch, Twitter Video, Vimeo, YouTube
• Music: Apple Music, Spotify
• Conferencing: Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Webex, WhatsApp, Zoom

Once you have decided which applications need to be tested you can start the test and wait several minutes before receiving the results.

If you like, you can share them with us on Feddit or in our Telegram group!

Download the application and test your connection

WeHe is available on both Android and iOS. For Android you can download it from both the Play Store and F-Droid that directly the APK. We would just like to point out that the version on the Play Store is slightly ahead of the APK (3.7.4 vs 3.7.2) but we don't seem to see any substantial differences.

Alternatives to WeHe: OONI Probe

This alternative was also reported to us on our Telegram group, which is more updated than WeHe and developed by The Tor Project, in case you want to try it we leave you the links.

This tag @loyal alternatives is used to automatically send this post to Feddit and allow anyone on the fediverse to comment on it.

1. What Is Internet Throttling And How Can You Test It? | Archive | PDF[↩]
2. Prevent your ISP from throttling your connection | archive.today[↩]
3. About Us | Archive | Conifer[↩]

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