Submitted by A Northern California fire department says Verizon slowed its wireless data speeds to a crawl last month, rendering some of its high-tech tracking equipment almost useless as firefighters battled the largest wildfire in state history.
In an August 20 court filing, Santa Clara County Fire Chief Anthony Bowden said his department relies on internet services to keep track of fast-moving fires and coordinate resources and efforts among emergency personnel.
American ISPs are almost cartoonishly evil.
Sounds like they need a separate network, developed by the government, to guarantee a level of service.
Oh wait.
This sounds like an ideal test case.
Let’s be real, the only reason it’s “a mistake” is because of the terrible optics of hurting firefighters. For average joe nobodies, verizon’s policy of dealing with high usage on “unlimited” packages is termination.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/21/12253530/verizon-unlimited-data-p…
To be clear, I don’t mind limits, but for the sake of truthful advertising this needs to be declared up-front! Bandwidth is expensive, I get it, but if a carrier can not afford to offer unlimited bandwidth for the whole billing period then they’ve got no business selling plans labeled as “unlimited”.
There are hardware limits: the devices sending & receiving, can do so only at their mutually-agreed maximum rate.
In terms of the data exchanged: their policies may impose arbitrary limitations. After crossing any of those, the exchange rate drops down, incrementally or instantly, to zero.
That’s basically how to protect a network. I have no problem so far.
The BIG FSCKING PROBLEM in this is that these terms weren’t spelled out explicitly. In the advertising; in the contracts; most of all, in the immediate life-or-death need for service.
What’s worse is that Verizon had no watch team to observe that a few HUNDRED of their customers suddenly got their data throttled.
This isn’t service. It’s corporate “not my circus, not my monkeys.”
Except that, if I’m reading it correctly, it wasn’t a question of instantaneous throughput (which would be about protecting the network) but about crossing a “total data transferred within a billing period” threshold, which actually negatively affects the network in the name of profit when applied to consumers because it causes them to bunch up their traffic at the beginning and end of billing periods.
(The beginning, when they’ve got plenty of quota to spare, and the end, when they’re trying to carefully use up what remains of what they paid for before the counter resets.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery#Federal_Trade_Commission_defin…
Oh yeah, that one semester of engineering law pays off!
“we made a mistake” is code for “fuck, we got caught”.
Lets face it, the Verizon reps answering the call followed policy. But they’re now thrown to the wolves by their PR dept.
Well, if I were a home owner who lost a house due to the fire, I’d be investigating my legal options and considering suing Verizon. They just admitted fault that delayed and impaired emergency responders that were trying to save my house.
And for any loved ones of the firefighters that lost their lives fighting the fires… If the slowdown in any way led to their deaths, they should not only be financially liable, but criminally as well.
Seems to me that excuse is close to the Nazi’s “I was only obeying orders” excuse. COMON SENSE has to prevail and real people should take risks to do the right thing. After all, the firefighters do!
I didn’t mean that in the sense that I was absolving the reps of guilt, but that it was the company at large that was ultimately responsible for the response of their reps. Verizon seemed to be blaming the reps for not following policy. I really doubt that…
It’s not limited to the US though: here in the Netherlands, Tele2 and T-Mobile also call their Unlimited plans “unlimited” but in reality, they have a Fair Use Policy. And if you go over the FUP limit (which, at least with Tele2, is about 6 GB a day), they’ll either throttle you so that you get slow speeds (T-Mobile) or you receive an angry letter that you need to check your traffic because you went over the FUP limit (Tele2).
Edited 2018-08-24 10:38 UTC
Our ISPs are more like Vogons: not actually evil, but bureaucratic, officious, and callus. It’s not as if Verizon actually said “hey, let’s fsck up the fire fighters!” but more like they didn’t have anyone watching the network to notice that there was an instantaneous throttling of an entire account and, once noticed, reverse it when it was clear that it was the fire department that was doing their job fighting a huge fire. The only part of this that I’d actually call evil is the advertising of an unlimited plan that is not really unlimited. The rest is just pure carelessness and negligence which, by the way, does not negate the fact that they need to fix it right away.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
— Robert Hanlon
Evil *is* the right word…. they are just lazy and Evil with a capital E.
Why target firefighters when you can blanket throttle everyone for profit!
We accept that throttling is “to protect the network”… but we see no actual data on this… also as I understand T-Mobile in the USA doesn’t throttle but deprioritises your traffic over a limit meaning you often still get full speed except during peak hours.
Edited 2018-08-24 13:25 UTC
cb88,
“Deprioritise” is their code-word for throttling. Tmobile’s “unlimited” plans have a 50GB limit before throttling. It isn’t packet prioritization/QOS as in normal network jargon.
On my tmobile plan I get throttled after 6GB. At home mobile internet is mostly redundant, but when I travel I reach that 6GB limit extremely quickly. For my last trip, I had to borrow my wife’s phone when I ran out. When it happens, internet usage becomes intermittent and you wonder if it’s just a cellular issue until you check the bandwidth usage and see that it’s over the limit.
It’s worse for my parents because they have no residential broadband services at home. When they use up their quota they can’t skype with us and even the web is painfully slow until the next billing period (think dialup in this day and age).
Tmobile plans have a twist, something they call “binge-on”, to let users watch lower quality streaming video without it counting against their quota. This can be turned on and off by the user. At face value, it sounds like a cool perk, but it’s somewhat deceptive because when it’s on, what tmobile actually does it throttle bandwidth 24/7 at mediocre speeds
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles-bingeon…
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3021790/data-center-cloud/t-mobile-a…
Some time ago I was irate that my file transfers would start very quickly and then decreased to a crawl (a tell-tale sign of artificial throttling). So I dug deeper and discovered that my file transfers were only being throttled when binge-on was enabled. I measured and collected all the data to prove this and sent it to tmobile to ask why they were throttling things like email and FTP when binge-on was enabled. They denied it and blamed it on being over my quota, which was false. So I submitted a case with the FCC, all they did though was forward my case to tmobile, haha.
Prior to being gutted by the new FCC head honcho ajit pai, the FCC would take on consumer cases based on how many complaints they got, like this one when tmobile’s limits on “unlimited” plans were kept secret:
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-reaches-48m-settlement-t-mobile-ove…
Edited 2018-08-24 16:20 UTC
At least our bees ain’t sleazy!!
My understanding is that the fire service did not option for a plan that couldn’t be throttled, which would have been available to them. I am sure if they had such a plan this wouldn’t have happened.
Not sure this is so. If you are running a critical service such as the fire service, you have a responsibility to make sure you have the right tools for the job. That includes choosing the correct Internet plan for the organisation. You can’t just like pick any plan and then demand special treatment because you are the fire service. If you pick a plan with throttling, then you should expect to be throttled, and sometimes at the worst possible time.
There are probably many things American ISPs do, but this is probably not one of those times.
But privatization is supposed to work like magic and provide the best solution by magic because of the benevolent invisible hand.
They had “unlimited” plan… such description suggests anything but throttling.
I agree with you. I think people do not understand the difference between capitalism and government owned monopolies.
Whomever contracted with Verizon (business, not government monopoly) did not write the contract properly (did not anticipate the need, did not understand the need, or were lazy). They are the ones negligent for fire fighters not having their tool available when needed. They are also the ones that should be in the spotlight and not Verizon.
Verizon along with most businesses love government work as it pays well/guaranteed and therefore do their best not to lose contracts due to lack of delivery. I do not pretend to know how the service was contracted, everything I have said is just a guess, and I am not a fan of Verizon; but with that said I have to defend them.
qilljr,
Ironic that, given verizon’s own admission that it did not communicate the terms of the firefighter’s plan and claims not to have followed it’s own procedures in getting the account unthrottled.