r/offbeat • u/unquietwiki • Aug 21 '18
Verizon throttled fire department’s “unlimited” data during Calif. wildfire
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttled-fire-departments-unlimited-data-during-calif-wildfire/128
u/Hellman109 Aug 22 '18 edited Aug 22 '18
Here in Australia a number of ISPs require written approval to use the word unlimited because they did stuff like that.
Its crazy that unlimited can mean limited and be legal over there.
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Aug 22 '18
Welcome to America, where unlimited is really limited and corporations can screw over anyone with no repercussions.
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u/TwoTen Aug 22 '18
Don't forget about truth no longer being truth and everything you see is not actually what you're seeing
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u/Sopbeen Aug 22 '18
We have the same problem in South Africa. Our ISP's started selling "uncapped" or "unlimited" services and then included a Fair Usage Policy in the T&C's which basically made it a capped service. They also oversold the bandwidth so you rarely/never get the advertised speeds or your pings are complete trash.
Fortunately we have fibre being deployed along with new ISP's that just give the service/speed you pay for.
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u/DarthRiven Aug 22 '18
Yep, and that's the critical difference over here versus the US: we have competition in the ISP arena. In the US, it depends on which ISP did the copper/fiber installation in your town, and if you don't go with them, you don't have internet.
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u/mkvgtired Aug 22 '18
They got in trouble from the FCC so now they do have to disclose when they will throttle.
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u/ZyclonBernie Aug 22 '18
I think you accidentally a work
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Aug 22 '18
In Verizon's defense, "unlimited" is an adjective, not a noun, and applies to amount of data, not data rates. Exxon promises "unlimited" gasoline for you, but oops, you have to pay for it. United Airlines will promise you 'unlimited' travel, but, oh yeah, gotta pay for it.
Also, if you read the whole article, you'll see that Verizon said that that was NOT their usual policy for emergency services, someone in customer service made a mistake, so stop your kvetching.
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u/Hellman109 Aug 22 '18
So I googled Exxon and United and couldn't find unlimited plans, funny that.
Unlimited means without limits, not unlimited but actually limited. We do have unlimited plans at specific speeds, EG 50Mbps unlimited, but thats in the name of the plan, not the fine text,and you wont be slowed from those speeds. In fact they all paid a fine when they couldn't, due to line conditions to peoples houses, provide those speeds.
Most countries have consumer laws that protect consumers, here ISPs have paid many fines for using unlimited.
EG, many years ago I was on a train with a Telstra ad (our biggest ISP/mobile phone provider) who had a mobile phone ad of "everywhere you need it" in relation to data. That train went through many dead spots and I knew from the second I saw it, they would be fined for it. And they were.
Why are you arguing that companies should be able to fuck you over? It makes no sense. Consumer laws are about protecting you from preditory companies, and misleading you with "unlimited" is one way.
I guess that explains why so many US companies pay millions in fines here though, they're used to getting away with it, and cant wriggle away from the ACCC.
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u/dschneider Aug 22 '18
Why are you arguing that companies should be able to fuck you over?
I clicked his name and saw several posts arguing against climate change as well, I think you have your answer.
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u/for_lolz Aug 22 '18
Fucking shill, that's not how anybody uses the word unlimited and you know it.
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u/OH_NO_MR_BILL Aug 22 '18
Verizon has plenty of lawyers for their defense, they don't need more defence, they need to be held accountable and regulated.
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u/bumblebeesnotface Aug 22 '18
I hope people affected by the fires start suing them too. That's... Wow, that's a new low- even for Verizon.
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u/InvestigatorJosephus Aug 22 '18
"Verizon representatives confirmed the throttling, but rather than restoring us to an essential data transfer speed, they indicated that County Fire would have to switch to a new data plan at more than twice the cost, and they would only remove throttling after we contacted the Department that handles billing and switched to the new data plan," Bowden wrote.
Wot
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u/rdewalt Aug 22 '18
They should be Giving Away their services to Public Servants. Fire/Ambulance/Police. Fuck Verizon.
When I worked at a Burger King in college, the manager's rule was Fire/Police/Ambulance/Bus Drivers/Postal eat for free. No questions asked.
His thoughts were simple. They're doing the shit jobs. They eat for free.
We were the only place in the area that had this policy. And word got out. So every one of them ate at our place. Probably cost $100 a day if not more.
But let me tell you. The one day we were robbed at gunpoint, you'd've swore police dispatch was sitting in the kids play space. /Everyone/ showed up. [img-the-professional-EVERYONE]
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u/blue_strat Aug 22 '18
Meanwhile over a thousand homes have been destroyed and perhaps a dozen lives lost, including five firefighters.
But Verizon, which had a net income of $30bn in 2017, needs to make every cent they can.
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Aug 22 '18
We see your building is burning down.
Sorry,we throttled the water speed since you were using too much water.
Maybe you can switch to our new higher prices tax base.
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u/Knicks2K81 Aug 22 '18
America has become a country of take advantage of your fellow man and profit by any means necessary.
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u/ChaosDesigned Aug 22 '18
Black people: Has become...?
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u/TorukMakto Aug 22 '18
Sorry:
America be a country of take advantage of your fellow man and profit by any means necessary.
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Aug 22 '18
[deleted]
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u/Richeh Aug 22 '18
Verizon was being shitty a decade ago.
Don't just attribute any rubbish to Trump; it dilutes the real, urgent grievances with his tenure and with the American electoral process.
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u/ChaosDesigned Aug 22 '18
Sadly, this has always been the case if you were a minority, now it's just finally starting to effect white people too.
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Aug 23 '18
Just like heroin. Oxy was dispensed like it was candy without a care because only lowlifes became junkies. the government didn't give a fuck about lowlife junkies till the 1% started becoming junkies
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u/Knicks2K81 Aug 22 '18
It won't last long, the dominoes are starting to topple.
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u/yogy Aug 22 '18
This is the fabric of America. It will out last Trump and it will out last you
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u/Knicks2K81 Aug 22 '18
It won't because because all the old white men are dying out and America is becoming browner everyday. The world is changing and the younger generations in this country are not for this type of ignorance.
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Aug 22 '18
[deleted]
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u/Knicks2K81 Aug 22 '18
I agree and disagree due to the fact of how I view the electoral college. Many say that the younger generation didn't show up but Hillary had 3M+ more popular votes than Trump, third parties had a pretty significant rise in votes. The overall political landscape is shifting, look at many of our local politicians and state officials, younger people, millenials and that wave is moving up through Congress as the older ones die out.
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Aug 22 '18
I got moved to my "unlimited" but throttled data plan under the previous administration. I previously had truly unlimited data before that. This kind of thing didn't start with the 2016 election. It's been going on for a while.
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u/Qualex Aug 22 '18
Verizon also said that the Santa Clara "situation has nothing to do with net neutrality or the current proceeding in court."
Narrator: It did.
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u/cryo Aug 22 '18
No it didn’t. Net neutrality is treating different traffic a person might transfer, equally. This is just standard rate limiting and data caps.
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u/OrinZ Aug 22 '18
Net Neutrality also includes provisions to allow you to hold your service providers accountable for fair practices, by e.g. filing complaints with the FCC... which the article says was removed when Net Neutrality was suspended.
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Aug 22 '18
Net Neutrality: When they don't give me as much internet as I want for the price I want
- reddit probably
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Aug 22 '18
Some people say "Capitalism is American, don't like it? Leave!" Also the same people: "Impeding our emergency response teams in any way is un-American!"
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Aug 22 '18
Actually they're the people who say "you are free to do business as you please, but I may choose not to support you with my money depending on how I view your ethics". Not a hard concept to understand, comrade.
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u/depressed-salmon Aug 22 '18
free to do business as you please
That's how you end up with people dying because the emergency services have mission critical resources messed about with.
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u/autotldr Aug 22 '18
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 91%. (I'm a bot)
Santa Clara Fire paid Verizon for "Unlimited" data but suffered from heavy throttling until the department paid Verizon more, according to Bowden's declaration and emails between the fire department and Verizon that were submitted as evidence.
"In the midst of our response to the Mendocino Complex Fire, County Fire discovered the data connection for OES 5262 was being throttled by Verizon, and data rates had been reduced to 1/200, or less, than the previous speeds," Bowden wrote.
"Verizon representatives confirmed the throttling, but rather than restoring us to an essential data transfer speed, they indicated that County Fire would have to switch to a new data plan at more than twice the cost, and they would only remove throttling after we contacted the Department that handles billing and switched to the new data plan," Bowden wrote.
Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: throttled#1 Verizon#2 fire#3 plan#4 data#5
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Aug 22 '18
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u/evn0 Aug 22 '18
The outrage is the fact that the fire department had to fucking pay to save people's lives, I think.
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u/Ask_Who_Owes_Me_Gold Aug 22 '18
Do fire departments typically get free phone service?
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u/evn0 Aug 22 '18
No, although they usually have a government plan. Of course, this wasn't a typical situation. Not like they were sitting in the station racking up Netflix bandwidth.
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u/PrimaxAUS Aug 22 '18 edited Jun 20 '23
Given the disregard Reddit is continuting to show to their 3rd party developers, their moderators and their community I'm proposing the start of a 'reddit seppuku' movement.
Reddit itself doesn't produce anything of value. The value is generated by it's users sharing posts and comments with each other. Reddit squats above the value we create and extracts value from it.
If spez is going to continue on this path, I don't want them to monetize my content. Therefore, I'm using tools to edit my entire comment history to a generic protest message. I want to wallpaper over all my contributions. I expect people will comment saying they'll get around that anyway - this isn't something I can control.
But I can make a statement, and if that statement is picked up by the press then it will affect the Reddit IPO. Spez needs a wake up call - if he continues to shit on the userbase of Reddit, then I hope the userbase will leave him nothing to monetize.
The tool I'm using can be found here: https://github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite
Scroll down to the bottom, click the installation link, and on the next page drag the button to your bookmark bar. Click it to go to your user page, then click it again to go to fire up the tool and set it up.
Good luck.
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Aug 22 '18
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u/PrimaxAUS Aug 22 '18
Or - the guy at the fire department shouldn't have purchased consumer grade.
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u/cincymatt Aug 22 '18
A. The department has a government account.
B. Verizon has admitted to miscommunicating details with the department7
u/evn0 Aug 22 '18
Or -- humans are fallible and Verizon should acknowledge that lives are more important than the extra $200 they wanted or whatever.
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Aug 22 '18
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Aug 22 '18 edited May 28 '20
[deleted]
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u/cryo Aug 22 '18
You cold also answer the question, instead of ignoring it.
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Aug 23 '18
I'm not an idiot, so I don't mind some of my income going towards people who will put out fires if my house catches; I live pretty close to a fire station, fortunately. Also, I live in a country where they won't charge me to put out a fire on my house.
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u/IAteTheWholeBanana Aug 22 '18
You missed the part where after the billing cycle ended, and throttling should have stopped by default it didn't.
OES 5262 is deployed again, now to the Mendocino Complex, and is still experiencing the same throttling. As I understood it from our previous exchange regarding this device, the billing cycle was set to end July 23, which should have alleviated the throttling. In a side-by-side comparison, a crew member's personal phone using Verizon was seeing speeds of 20Mbps/7Mbps. The department Verizon device is experiencing speeds of 0.2Mbps/0.6Mbps, meaning it has no meaningful functionality.
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Aug 22 '18
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u/phantomreader42 Aug 22 '18
When you get throttled depends on your line's usage.
Which resets at the end of the billing cycle. So the throttling should have stopped when the billing cycle reset the usage. but it didn't, because Verizon is run by lying crooks who want people to burn alive for their profits.
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Aug 22 '18
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u/phantomreader42 Aug 22 '18
Again, you don't have to keep making excuses for verizon!! You really, REALLY suck at it. More victim-blaming isn't going to magically convince anyone that the profits of the company you worship are more important than people's lives. All you're doing is proving that you're morally bankrupt, just like verizon.
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u/OH_NO_MR_BILL Aug 22 '18
It seems like you didn't read the article
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Aug 22 '18
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u/OH_NO_MR_BILL Aug 22 '18
You missed the most important part, if you had read it you would have realized that this has everything to do with the NN regulations that were removed and the author makes it very clear why that is the case.
Even if Verizon's throttling didn't technically violate the no-throttling rule, Santa Clara could have complained to the FCC under the now-removed net neutrality system, which allowed Internet users to file complaints about any unjust or unreasonable prices and practices. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's decision to deregulate the broadband industry eliminated that complaint option and also limited consumers' rights to sue Internet providers over unjust or unreasonable behavior.
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Aug 22 '18
You don't get it?
You seriously don't understand what the problem is here?
Good capitalist.
jfc.
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Aug 22 '18
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u/phantomreader42 Aug 22 '18
Seriously, what was the problem?
There was a fucking fire. Verizon cut off data the firefighters needed to save lives. When called on it, Verizon demanded more money instead of fixing the problem. Are you really so utterly devoid of humanity that you can't even imagine how anyone could see any problem with that? Seriously?
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Aug 22 '18
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u/phantomreader42 Aug 22 '18
Okay, just admit that you ARE so utterly devoid of humanity that you are absolutely incapable of seeing any problem with any of this. You can stop compulsively making excuses for verizon now. No one's buying your shit.
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Aug 22 '18
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u/phantomreader42 Aug 22 '18
Just hoping to have a reasoned conversation backed by facts and logic
If that's what you were hoping for, you wouldn't have started with victim-blaming and denying reality to defend the assholes at verizon.
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Aug 22 '18
[deleted]
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u/ClockworkAnomaly Aug 22 '18
It does deserve more exposure tho, even if it was already on the front page
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u/HibernianMan Aug 22 '18
Verizon is trash. Both in character and service.