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Verizon Throttled California Fire Department's Data Speeds During Wildfire Response [Updated]
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Style points for not reading the article and commenting. In a typical seeing nothing wrong worldview popular today.Maybe this will help you:
"Regardless of the plan emergency responders choose, we have a practice to remove data speed restrictions when contacted in emergency situations. We have done that many times, including for emergency personnel responding to these tragic fires. In this situation, we should have lifted the speed restriction when our customer reached out to us. This was a customer support mistake. We are reviewing the situation and will fix any issues going forward."
Services like communications for the fire department should be required to be comped entirely by our government, and are worth the extra tax dollars.
If you really think that's whats going to happen then I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. It might start out that way but eventually they will become just as bad....The American consumer has seen this movie many times before
That’s a grey area. On one hand, you have lives and property at risk. On other hand, the fire department needs to purchase the proper plan.
I had a t-Mobil plan that was unusable when throttling was active. And I mean unusable. I waited 1 full hour for the www.t-Mobile.com to load and it wouldnt. I could not even log on to buy a bigger plan. So I opted to cancel my t-mobile plan but I had to do it over the phone.
In the past Verizon does lift the throttling during these cases of emergencies. They admitted that their customer service made a mistake during this incident. Exceptions are actually given, as they should, during extreme emergencies. They also admitted that they should have been more clear regarding the terms of their service so that incidences like this don't happen.
I assume the services did just that before mobile internet was a thing as well. We're all slaves to the technology now. Sure it is a hella convenience, but it does leave room for things to go wrong, and then for fingers to be pointed. In all directions.
Regardless of whether Verizon is “nice” or “evil”, the fault lies with the fire department. And if there are any lawsuits, it is the fire department that is responsible.
When you design an emergency response plan, it is up to you to research all the elements involved in your plan.
It is no secret that Verizon throttles data if you are using a lot of it at once. It is unlimited in quantity... not unlimited in high speed access. That fact has been well known, and it’s in the written policy.
The fire department failed to research the plan, or they chose to purchase a plan that didn’t meet their needs.
Somebody at the fire department got lazy, took the gamble, and lost.
Now they try to blame Verizon.
I don’t like Verizon. But ultimately, this is the Fire Departments fault. They should have verified they purchased a sufficient plan for their kind of usage prior to deploying their emergency service plan.
When you design an emergency response plan, it is up to you to research all the elements involved in your plan.
It is no secret that Verizon throttles data if you are using a lot of it at once. It is unlimited in quantity... not unlimited in high speed access. That fact has been well known, and it’s in the written policy.
The fire department failed to research the plan, or they chose to purchase a plan that didn’t meet their needs.
Somebody at the fire department got lazy, took the gamble, and lost.
Now they try to blame Verizon.
I don’t like Verizon. But ultimately, this is the Fire Departments fault. They should have verified they purchased a sufficient plan for their kind of usage prior to deploying their emergency service plan.
Kinda thought public service access was part of the deal for allowing Verizon to buy the radio bandwidth and frequency range they did from us, we the people of the United States. Maybe its time to look at the conditions of that bid and see if this is a violation and grounds to revoke their lease.
I don't believe that's the issue at play here - those services are covered by Govt dollars - but a Corporation shouldn't be able to do something like this to anyone, especially vital Emergency services.
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I get your point, but then why can we always call 911 on a disabled cell-phone? (see post 88) I believe there is some Corporate Predation at play here as well.
You see nothing wrong with an unlimited plan being limited?
Call someone other than the Fire Department when your house is on fire, or your neighbours house is on fire and your house is at a high risk to be engulfed in flames next. The Fire Dept is trying their best to tackle these fires, show some respect instead of sitting behind your keyboard and giving us an ethics and moral lecture. Unlimited is unlimited, when did unlimited becomes up to, this is a gross marketing deception practice that needs a class action law suit. When things are burning all around you, making a phone call to lift the data cap is not top priority, people are stressed, tired and not thinking about that unlimited data plan not being unlimited. Planning for fires, really when it is a wild fire and unpredictable there is very little planning one can do, control burns to get it under control is all one can hope for. Another fire starts, weather conditions change, how do you predict that.
I am glad to hear that Verizon is fixing the problem. If it was left to you, the world can burn until trouble knocks at your door, then you will cry out aloud to save your home. You sound heartless. Return to your cave, we are better off without your selfish mentality.
I think Verizon could have handled this better. The PR thing to have done, was to assist the fire department during the crisis. Afterward, slice through the red tape to make sure all parties are on the proverbial same page, as to features, limitations and cost.
Sounds like to me someone at the Fire Department is trying to cover their ass. $99 a month for a command and response vehicle should be a no brainier. Maybe they should have reviewed their data plan like we all do to figure out what's best for them. I'm all for trying to save the taxpayer's money, but we are talking about $45/month here for something that is mission critical to fighting fires. DUH.
...if you, Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc actually cared about censorship (which you don’t), you would be against the mass censorship of right wing thought. cc: Alex Jones and other prominent thought leaders.
Funny you don’t even go after the company that is actually doing the censoring, it’s muhhh Trump and Pai’s fault.
This just shows me you actually have no idea what Net Neutrality is and why it shouldn’t be the FCC but actually the FTC keeping these companies in check.
But keep on spewing liberal talking points. Just makes my case stronger.
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Lol
Emergency personnel shouldn't have data caps. PERIOD! They shouldn't have to REACH OUT TO YOU. What kind of happy horse **** is that?
Personally, as my tweets have said, Verizon should be held responsible for ANY loss of life/property damage that occurred due to this negligence. Period, the end. Maybe then, they will get a clue that they're not as big as they like to think they are.
That goes for ...
Verizon
AT&T
TMobile
Sprint
And whoever else thinks 25GB of data a month is "UNLIMITED".
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Or some intelligent person or computer program at Verizon could have put 2 and 2 together at their end and noticed OH - these numbers are tied to this account- FIREFIGHTER numbers!!! They're using a LOT OF DATA! Oh, CALI has fires going on right now? LOTS OF THEM?? They need to communicate more than normal???
BETTER REMOVE THE DATA CAP SO THEY CAN DO THEIR JOB!
That would be the logical thing. I mean seriously.
You are in no position to judge if I care about censorship. And if you knew anything about me and my history of championing causes against censorship and for privacy over the past 25 years of my IT career, you'd be a fool to caste judgment so foolishly.
But I digress. Alex Jones sucks, and his fake fanaticism reeks more than stepping onto freshly dropped cow chips on a hot summer day.
They wouldn't be in this position if they haven't tried so bloody hard to completely neuter Net Neutrality. It has nothing to do with the company at that point, as it was the government that completely killed it. None of this would have happened, if NN wasn't unharmed.
Now with that said, VZW deserves a ton of blame on this, and if you had bothered to read my subsequent post, you would have seen that. But immediately jump on this without bother to read anything else.
I don't need to show how laughably wrong you are about what you think I know. All I have to say is this: if it weren't for me and people like me maintaining the servers you use, you wouldn't even be here to argue about what you think I may or may not know about Net Neutrality.
Feel free to revisit and argue with me privately if you want to see my bona fides. Again, you'll find that I know not only more than you realize, but helped to create some of the platforms you use.
You're Welcome. - Maui
BL.
Ah yes, exactly. They were the ones that made this happen, after all.
Wait...no...that's not at all what happened here.
This has nothing to do with net neutrality even slightly sort of a little bit kind of. It was Verizon ****ing up, plain and simple. Not everyone is the Great Orange Drump's fault...don't people get tired of this constantly?
The reason you want government to have to pay like anyone else for services is so you can understand exactly how much government costs, try (futilely) to make government more efficient, and properly allocate resources. If a government agency or anyone isn’t subject to some sort of restriction then they will tend to overuse. Yes, fire fighting may be important, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we want the fire department to be able to use all the data they can. That gives them no incentive to look for efficiency improvements. It may be that their current data consumption is because they do things inefficiently. We don’t want that to go on or get worse.
I'm sorry, but this article is causing confusion on net neutrality (which btw I do support fully). Maybe you mean the same laws protecting net neutrality also allowed users to file complaints. They're unrelated issues.
Not that it would've mattered since the fire dept needed to fix this way more quickly than any complaint to would've been processed, in a queue with complaints from thousands of dumb and angry users.
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You didn't answer the question you replied to. Throttling data is not "something that those companies want due to no Net Neutrality." They could always do it, and it's unrelated.
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Washington State has incorporated net neutrality into state law.
This has nothing to do with net neutrality. This is Verizon’s own proprietary cell network and they weren’t throttling access to certain places.
It has everything to do with a moronic company that doesn’t get it. These “unlimited” plans are stupid and fraudulent. Customer service is dead, who was the idiot who decided to count pennies for Verizon in this situation? Wow
It has everything to do with a moronic company that doesn’t get it. These “unlimited” plans are stupid and fraudulent. Customer service is dead, who was the idiot who decided to count pennies for Verizon in this situation? Wow