If they are selling an "unlimited" plan, then it should be unlimited (i.e. without throttling of any kind)

If they are selling a "20GB then throttled to 128kbs speeds" plan, then call it a "20GB plus" plan so everyone knows what they are buying.

Although Ars Technica is beating the net neutrality drum, this has more to do with a fire department administrator going cheap on operational costs, or not using the California state contracts. They are using an aircard in a command vehicle, probably with PC, multiple mobile devices and video as well. Just pay the $75 vs $40/mo, and you don’t have this problem.

Also, another jurisdiction like police, state emergency management, Feds, etc may have a plan that allows them to deprioritize you at any time. If they were in FirstNet, a machine to machine plan, or a Verizon public safety plan, there would be no issue.

I'm happily living on a 250MB plan.

I mean, if it is important enough to not be omitted...

That's the larger problem I alluded to. My point was about these important public services not doing some of the diligence many of us can. It's not about fine print or not, clearly what Verizon does is wrong, I'm just saying that these places need to put in a bit more research.

I think everyone here agrees that these companies shouldn't mislead, so just repeating that seems like obvious and meaningless discussion. I put "despite the overarching issues", "we can all [...] bemoan that [...] Verizon [...] have red tape", "I empathize", "fix the [...] wording as we'd like it to", "that needs fixing", "in the meantime", and "bigger problem [...] that's a different deal" all because it's clear what the larger problem is. My point is nuanced about public services and due diligence in these current annoying times, but clearly my attempts to avoid the obvious point didn't work.

You can't just assign the victim label and be done with your argument. There is nuance and shared responsibility.

Not everything is an exercise in identifying the victim, therefore the other is the perpetrator, therefore the 'victim' is absolved.

I think this goes back to the "don't sell an unlimited plan if you're going to insist on limits". Verizon didn't have to call it an unlimited plan, they chose to.

They could have just chosen not to compete in a market with unregulated definitions. You are improperly hating the player and not the game as though it's reasonable for them to not use definitions their competitors use when competing.

I don't think it's about regulating words. If you promise to sell a blue dog but sell a green dog, I don't expect a regulation saying blue has to be blue.

It's just false advertisement.

Verizon's a victim, yes, but it's a self-inflicted problem caused by their misleading marketing so they don't deserve any pity. Verizon willfully tries to bury and downplay the limitations of their "unlimited" services, and it is entirely appropriate for them to bear the blame when people or local government agencies fall for it.

"Unlimited 4G LTE Data" for $40

"Unlimited 4G LTE Data (22 GB)" for $50

"Unlimited 4G LTE Data (75 GB)" for $60

There is a little (i) symbol next to each one, with a mouse over box that explains the throttling. The throttling is also explained if you click the link "important plan info."

The first option could be clearer with a parenthetical, but with the three right next to each other alongside the prices it's pretty clear what you're buying.

> By "unlimited", we really meant "limited".

shouldn't be a valid defense for misleading consumers. The plan would be more accurately described as "15GB 4G LTE Data". If the limits were stated more prominently, the fire departments could have avoided confusion and worked with Verizon or a competitor to get on a plan that wouldn't stop working at the worst possible times. Verizon could have also avoided some bad press by just waiving the fees and sorting things out later instead of demanding extra money during an emergency.

It is pretty much impossible to construct a pricing plan for data service that will make power users happy. Data caps were crystal clear, but they are "gouging" because marginal bandwidth costs almost nothing. Fixed speed tiers are "false advertising" because sometimes the network is too congested to hit the advertised speed. The real issue is that companies are trying to achieve price discrimination, which benefits the average customer and the company at the expense of customers who use the product more intensively. It's like how Apple charges hundreds of dollars more for a few dollars worth of extra flash memory in an iPhone.

It's perfectly sensible to design the plan that way. I'm not complaining about the technical aspects, I'm complaining about the naming.

I don't really see the relevance of your second paragraph. Yes, people will complain regardless. That doesn't make false advertising OK. The real issue is that companies want to sell something they cannot provide.

There is no a priori limit at which you get throttled. If there is no congestion, you can exceed your limit and not get throttled. Even if you get throttled, you don't get cut off, just slowed down.

There's certainly more accurate ways to describe that than "unlimited" but I don't think it's particularly egregious compared to U.S. marketing in general.

Unlimited iPhone X

small print: Actually only can hold 256GB.

Yes, what all carriers are doing is lying. The corrupt telecommunication and advertising industries allow it lobby for it, and the US government allows it. Many other governments do not.

(Strictly speaking there is an asterisk, but it indicates that there are multiple versions of the hardware, unrelated to throttling.)

In any case, this is not quite analogous. There's a difference between "you can only achieve this speed sometimes" and "your plan is unlimited only if you don't pass the limit." It's not that "unlimited" is only true under specific conditions, it's that it's never true.

I don't understand the purpose of your comment. Even if there are worse things out there, so what?

I think advertising is bullshit in general. Yogurt commercials talking about probiotics and whatnot. But that's a much bigger debate, and I suspect we agree on that front. But if we define "false advertising" to exclude most U.S. advertising, I think it excludes Verizon's data plans as well. It's technically true because they don't cut you off after a certain number of MBs. That's all advertising has to be in the U.S.

(And as a practical matter, it's not even really misleading for the typical consumer. I've never looked at my bandwidth usage after switching to Verizon's "unlimited" plans, despite having very heavy cell phone users in my household. Even if I'm exceeding the soft limits, where I live I never run into congestion that would lead to throttling. The marketing accurately conveys that the typical consumer can stop worrying about overages. Which is a lot better than the promises made by yogurt commercials.)

I guess this is the confusion. My point is not that Verizon is doing something unusual and should be singled out for it. My point is that Verizon's behavior here is emblematic of how this country treats advertisers in general, and an "unlimited" plan with limits is just particularly obvious example of how we let companies lie to us.

The appropriate offer is here where you must contact a rep who is probably trained to inquire about the business's requirements: https://www.verizonwireless.com/biz/plans/business-unlimited...

For the $40 plan, the page says "For people who want unlimited, and no worries", and if I were buying a plan for fire command center, that's exactly what I'd want -- unlimited and no worries.

Though since none of the pricing they mentioned in the article matches what's on this page, it's likely that they did have some business plan.

> Important Plan Information

> Unlimited Plans 4G LTE only. During times of congestion, your data may be temporarily slower than other traffic (only after 22GB/mo on Beyond Unlimited or 75 GB/mo on Above Unlimited).

Beyond that, anybody who is purchasing service for something like a fire department would know the difference between best effort service and a service with an SLA. Consumers will always be best served by having over-provisioning and best-effort service, because their needs are by nature bursty. Put another way, if you build a network that never throttles, you're leaving tons of capacity on the table that would be better used to offer faster burst downloads.

That problem is not best-effort service, it's a government entity that doesn't realize it needs a level service with real guarantees.

Their complaint is that they were throttled 24/7, not just during congestion.

> But while such throttling is generally applied only during times of network congestion, the Santa Clara Fire Department says it was throttled at all times once the device in question went over a 25GB monthly threshold.

Before we allow ISP's to (ab)use fires, we should insist on provable congestion. If they refuse to self-regulate the internet traffic in the public interest, then the public interest should move to regulate internet traffic just like it regulates car traffic: priority to emergency services first.

In fact I am not against on the spot pricing schemes, as long as the demand and supply is provable.

I would consider such a system neutral enough. I wouldn't mind scheduling some datasets to download when network demand is low etc...

https://i.imgur.com/vXIXSlA.png Here I started a download, the rsrq drops. After finishing, the rsrq rises again. Note that the values are still "jittery" so a single value should not be taken as a clear indicator that a cell is congested.

https://i.imgur.com/opdFV9d.png Here is a graph for the last 7 days. One can see that during nighttime received quality rises, while it lowers during daytime.

Device in use is a Huawei B618, no external antennas.

In my experience, this is BS. I live in the sticks and when I hit my limit (which is 15GB in mifi...22GB is for phones), I get 600kpbs or less at all times, not just during "congestion". And I can't imagine how much congestion there is in my rural area. 600kbps is nearly non-usable.

If I sold you unlimited water but after 1 gallon you could only drink one drop per minute that doesn't make me a liar but it does make me an asshole for telling you it was unlimited.

The plans clearly say that for Mifi (i.e. hotspots), the limit is 15GB with 600kbps thereafter, not unlimited...

No regulation leads to social Darwinian inverted totalitarianism where corporations are free to indirectly exploit, savage and murder whomever doesn't pay.

To be clear, I am not talking about safety regulation, but competition regulation.

Look at New Zealand and countless other countries who have forcably unbundled their networks. Everyone pays less and there is true competition between providers.

Utilities like the internet gravitate toward monopolies and less competition. Utilities MUST have regulation to protect consumers from their monopolistic nature.

At least as to wired Internet, they don't: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t... see also: https://www.recode.net/2017/12/13/16773062/global-internet-s.... The U.S. beats Germany, the U.K., France, Spain, and Italy (the countries comprising the large majority of the EU population).

The U.S. is also one of just five countries to have more than 90% LTE coverage: https://opensignal.com/reports/2018/02/state-of-lte. The big EU countries have faster LTE speeds, but much lower coverage (ranging from 65% in Germany to 83% in Spain).

Belgium has a 94.5% coverage as per last year. The report shows 85%.

The reason is pretty simple, per the report: "OpenSignal's availability metric tracks the proportion of time users have access to a particular network."

That's not coverage. Your source doesn't show what you think it does!

That was years ago though so things may be different now.

You'd use the same line of argument here, if we are talking about an actual emergency and not just ordinary operations (can see that from the article). I do understand intentional actions like price gouging are worse than keeping the usual automats running. But still, with "state of emergency" in effect, I'd hope for communication companies making all installed (idle) capacity available, even when not payed for.

In such an environment, if I couldn’t be sure when the next supplies were going to be available, it would be entirely rational to buy as many supplies as my family needed for the worst reasonable case. So, right up until the gas, food, and water runs out, I’m buying at a normal price.

Now, companies that might be able to truck supplies in from nearby areas (using additional trucks, fuel, and overtime labor) also don’t have a profit motive available to them, because they can only sell at normal+10% prices, which may not cover the genuine increased costs.

So in an attempt to protect consumers, we move from a state where supplies are available to those with need (albeit at higher prices) to a state where the quickest, sharpest, and best capitalized get all the food, water, and fuel and none is available at any price. I think the latter state is a less desirable one.

Capitalism & markets are great, but have failure modes we have to be aware of. Emergency situations exhibit many of those and thus it can be beneficial to temporarily suspend usual markets and capitalism on some levels. You cant make an informed purchase decision with no time, information, nothing to trade or a combination of all of those factors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_gouging#Laws_against_pri...

See the quote from the Texas AG in the article here: https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-attorney-general-warns-price...

If you were a shop owner faced simultaneously with increased inbound costs, constrained supply, utility interruptions, your own family and home to be concerned with, and that threat from the AG, would you sell anything to anyone? To anyone over 65? Why not just close up shop until the situation passes and hunker down at home protecting your own family? I’d probably do the latter rather than risk the fines. Does that make people better off?

In a survival situation, suppressing the price signal suppresses the clearest signal for consumers not to over-buy, especially for goods that can be traded for other needed supplies.

$99/case for water the day after a hurricane might very well be the “optimal” price until the soda/beer companies can switch over to bottling (canning) water to the affected area. Keep it at $18-20/case and the first 5 customers will rationally buy it all, because that checks that concern off their list. It doesn’t even require them to be misanthropes, just providing for and protecting their families. Worst case, water becomes available quicker than they thought and no harm to them other than they bought $100 worth of water for $100.

Also, these plans are bespoke and rarely worked with, its likely their Verizon rep didn't bother to look into any of the handful of custom plans that you get as a WSCA account. Another benefit is a flat 25% discount or thereabouts IIRC, any public agency or charity in most states can get these plans FYI.

Are you assuming it's possible?

First, if they're a monopoly, your "due diligence" is "Yep, we need a service and they're the only ones who provide it. We build our own using money we'll never have or we go with them."

Second, cell phone companies are known for lying. Just outright lying. (My proof: If a service is limited, calling it unlimited is a lie.) How can you do due diligence when the party you do it with is lying to you?

About 2 years ago, a couple employees including myself began working at a new location with no wired internet access. They were given Verizon USB dongles to plug into their laptops. Including those dongles, company-wide there were only a handful of devices on this Verizon plan.

Over time, the company got more employees at the new location. We were provided a wireless hotspot (one of the verizon jetpack devices) for everyone in the office to use. Eventually we started getting messages from the company's IT department that we were using too much data. Turns out every single verizon device at the company shared a single 60 GB data cap. Our device alone used like 15-20 GB. It only takes a couple devices used like that to blow past the data cap.

Since the company was adding new employees at the new location, as well as giving out more dongles, we managed to get them to switch to a larger data plan. I think it was 80 GB. As you can probably guess, it didn't take long to go over the cap again. Finally, some time late last year we were told by IT that the company switched to an unlimited data plan. No more caps.

Fast forward to the last 3-6 months. Like clockwork towards the end of the month the internet is slow as hell in the office. I would clock it in the 20-70 kbps range. We check the display on the hotspot and the data usage section says "Data usage: 26 GB / unlimited". I call our IT department and am told, "that's really strange. Let me call Verizon."

The next day IT calls me back. I get told "You're not going to believe this. The company data plan is unlimited. Verizon has a per-device cap at 22 GB, and then they throttle the connection. They want such an exorbitant fee to increase the device cap that it was cheaper for me to order a hotspot for everyone in the office (about 4 or 5 new devices)." Since we had a bunch of local devices set up on the jetpack's LAN, now whenever we hit the 22 GB cap and get throttled, we just swap in a new SIM from another device.

It really makes me laugh though, because when we have a few devices using roughly 15-20 GB each, Verizon had no problem letting us blow past the 60 GB data cap. None of the devices throttled the connection. The company would just receive a bill with hefty per-GB overage charges each month. When we switched to the 'unlimited' plan, IT was just as surprised as we were with the throttling. That was the whole point of the 'unlimited' plan.

This is one anecdote. But the fire department's experience reminds me way too much of the experience at my company. It's possible that both the fire department IT and my company's IT didn't do their due diligence. But my instinct tells me that verizon doesn't always make it clear that "unlimited data plan" is "unlimited data plan with a per-device cap, and subsequent throttling," especially if you are switching from a capped multi-device plan to an 'unlimited' multi-device plan.