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.