In a recent announcement, Vodafone and Meta revealed a collaboration aimed at boosting the efficiency of UK mobile networks for video streaming. This topic of “network optimization” caught our attention for a number of reasons, including Harmonic’s work on the subject around 2018. At that time, the industry was seeking a system to provide feedback from the mobile network to the application to adaptively reduce resolution during network congestion (at the RAN level). This would allow all ongoing connections to continue with a reduced quality of service (QoS), confined to the RAN, and release the constraints when the traffic can flow more normally. One way to describe this is adaptive zero-rating. Zero-rating is commonly applied by MNOs to content providers…