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To Verizon, "Unlimited" Means 5 GB
Jason writes "For years there have been stories about people getting their unlimited Verizon EVDO Wireless accounts terminated because of excessive data usage, but Verizon never explicitly said that there is a limit. Now if you dive into the terms of the Unlimited Data Service plan they have put a section in that specifically states that anything over 5GB of data usage in a one month period is considered prima facie evidence that you must be downloading movies, and you will be cut off."
And what if you paid for those movies?
Reminds me of some time ago when I got my first hard drive with "unlimited" capacity... and then accidentally filled it up with 5GB of movies in the first few days of using it.
I vowed next time to get a hard drive with at least twice unlimited capacity.
Optimist: The thumb drive is half empty! Pessimist: The thumb drive is half full...
Companies are slowing evolving into lawyer-based companies, where they will soon have a whole codebook to define what each word in the dictionary really means. This is all for the money, no doubt.
My .ca ISP never said "unlimited" but 90 GB/month. They never write unless I hit at least 120 GB. And they don't send forward letters from the RIAA/MPAA
and what if you're downloading linux distributions or other operating systems? ISO's for DVD's are consistently around 4gb. IF you download one dvd iso and one cd iso theres a good chance you will already be over the limit.
In Canada just pay .02 cents per kB. What a great deal!
If Bush wants to kill the terrorists, he should jump off a cliff.
In a brief overview of the logs that are kept by a gateway at the local university, it shows that, on a daily basis, 32 members of my dormitory floor download at roughly 700KBps average during the day (that's total for all users). That's about 60,480,000 KB per day. Fifty NINE gigabytes per day. Divide that by 32. 1,845MB per person, per day. This is a reasonable number for college students. Let's assume that up to 75% of that is bittorrent, other peer to peer traffic, or what have you. That's STILL 461MB per person, per day, of assumed legitimate traffic. This is AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Web browsing, and other legal Internet services. 461MB * 30 days = 13,837MB or 13.5GB. I rest my case.
That's totally besides the point. If they say it's unlimited, then it should be unlimited. It may be a bad idea business wise for them to provide ulimited bandwidth for a fixed price, as you correctly point out, but that's their problem.
-Enfors-
Doesn't the US have somethign equivalent to the British Trades Description Act. If they tried selling 'unlimited' internet access with a limit in the UK it would be, de facto, illegal, whatever the small print.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Yes, they will cut you off, but not because they assume you're pirating movies.
If you read the actual terms you'll see this:
Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) continuous uploading, downloading or streaming of audio or video programming or games;
Basically, they don't want you using the internet to purchase movies or music from anyone other than Verizon. It's an incredibly anti-competitive action.
Unlimited Data Plans and Features (such as NationalAccess, BroadbandAccess, Push to Talk, and certain VZEmail services) may ONLY be used with wireless devices for the following purposes: (i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) intranet access (including access to corporate intranets, email, and individual productivity applications like customer relationship management, sales force, and field service automation). The Unlimited Data Plans and Features MAY NOT be used for any other purpose.Paragraph 1 of the Verizon terms state plainly that the Unlimited plain means unlimited bandwidth for a particular small set of uses:
Reminds me of an ISP in Germany that offered unlimited broadband for cheap 7 bucks a month.
They also gave me a brand new VoIP-enabled wireless router as a welcome present and didn't even charge for the first 3 months.
After 5 months that guy calls: "I want to talk to you about your DSL plan [...] over the past months you've been downloading an average 181 GB a month [...] up to 243 GB [...] bla bla bla"
He then offered me 100 bucks if I agree to quit the plan immediately and never come back.
So:
State-of-the-art VoIP-router: 0,00$
5 months of downloading TV series: -14,00$
Getting paid to leave: : +100,00$ (priceless)
---------------
all of the above: +86,00$
* - Bullshit!
Well, you might find that extremely limited (and it is) but it isn't so strange for me. In Belgium the major ISPs (Belgacom, Telenet) allow about 10Gb quota per month, with 5 euro per 5Gb for extra quota. This is expensive! Downloading a movie or even a linux distribution DVD costs you several euros on bandwidth alone.
Minor ISPs use this a nice way into the market. (For example, mine allows me 20Gb default with a 0.25 euro cents per Gb over that upto 60Gb per month).
Offcourse, all limits are openly advertised...
"Unlimited", 5 GB means old V lawyers have a 32 bit overflow "feature" in their vocabulary, rounded up, 2^32 = 4294967296. V is also for Verizon.
Someone who's IM'ing 13.5 GB/Month won't be in college long...
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Nonono...they TELL you that it's unlimited, then slip in the 5GB limit into the fine print. It's false advertising.
The problem is that Verizon ADVERTISES the plan as unlimited. Although I can not say from experience, it would not surprise me if Verizon employees also advertised it as such or just not mention the fine print when signing you up. Remember, it's all about the money...they want you as a customer and if you manage to miss the fine print for 15 days, after which they have you as an income stream for 2 years (before which you can legally terminate your contract w/o penalty).
The previous poster is correct. Verizon should not be allowed to advertise in such a misleading way.
--
its all down to the definition. A 'normal' user, reading pages, and sending/receiving email, would see 5gb as more then they would use. Someone with greater needs, such as to download large files, would see 5gb as barely adequate. Hell, even re installing a Steam account on your computer could fill that in a day.
That aside, the thing is that companies like Verizon have seen their old pricing model prove inadequate over time, and they want to distance themselves from the previous model. The interweb was such that only people downloading illegally were exceeding their previously undefined upper limit. I would imagine they got the 5gb value by doing some data mining on their customers. I'd bet that most never go near 5gb.
I imagine they know people will soon start buying movies and other large media online as a matter of course, and they want to be able to charge for 'premium' access. The best way to achieve that is show that they are taking action now against heavy downloaders, demonstrating the need for different levels of access, so they cannot be accused of suddenly instituting a new system for the sake of profit only.
I would cope with metered access, if it meant no hassle when I did transfer a lot. I do often have to transfer large amounts of data between home and my lab overnight.
The contract is fair and reasonable, but conflicts with their advertising. You can't advertise the Brooklyn Bridge for sale and then present someone with a contract for a tenement in The Bronx. People just want truthful advertising.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
5 (gigabytes / month) = 15.9494775 kbps. That's a quarter of the dialup speed. You can reach 5 GB/month using your good old 56 kbps dialip connection 6 hours a day on its max capacity. Enough said.
In other news, I pay 25 euros/month for a 8 Mbps down/512 Kbps up unlimited cable line, and I consider it expensive, and plan to change to the competitor that offers a 4M/512K by under 20 euros. God bless Europe.
This isn't limited to mobile phone access. They actually market this as a feasible alternative to DSL and cable. If you go to their product site, you'll find that they advertise that the speeds are comparable to DSL, and they offer a PC card so that you can connect without using your phone. And while they offer the plan cheaper with a 2-year phone contract ($59.99), you'll notice that you can purchase this service for a little more without any voice plan at all ($79.99).
So on the one hand, they're advertising this as an easy and convenient alternative to DSL, while at the same time rewriting the terms of service to make it abundantly clear that it's not intended to compete with DSL. If you're going to be actually using the bandwidth you're paying for ($79.99 is about twice as expensive as a regular DSL line in my area), they want you to get a real DSL setup that can actually handle the advertised bandwidth.
Except that they have corporate lawyers on staff that deal with "annoying" lawsuits like this without really costing them anything. It will cost you 50K - 100K to start unless you are lucky enough to find a very good lawyer (and they will need to be good to go up against Verizon) that is willing to do it on spec. You KNOW the FTC and other government agencies are not going to come to your aid, right???
Lots of consultants and sales people in the company where I work have laptops. These people travel a lot and some (like me) work from a home office. Rather than each of us using an external disk drive to do backups, our laptops have software installed that backs up data from the laptop to a website that is run by a third-party company.
.exe files) from my laptop took about 5 GB. Future backups are incremental, but the initial backup would have put me over the Verizon "unlimited" limit without any movies or MP3 files being involved. It's a good thing I'm with a different ISP.
The initial backup of data (not
So in my book unlimited, is not unlimited! I wish vendors and customers would stop advertizing/expecting that. I think it is fair game to say "5 Gig/mo, additional traffic charged by rate". That is comparable when shopping for a connection. I am all for no-nonsense price structures.
I personally wouldn't choose a connection with true unlimited/unmetered price structure. That means that I would share the total bandwith with DIVX-heads constantly downloading while I struggle to get SSH and VoIP operate at a latency like [insert favorite unfavorite place].
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
Unlimited data and unlimited bandwidth aren't the same. Why doesn't Verizon just throttle abusers? They can still have their unlimited data as advertised, just at a rate of 2400bps.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Paying for movies is so old-fashioned. I don't think people do it any more. If you are downloading more the 5GB then you are definitely a pirate.
But take comfort in the fact that you are helping stop global warming.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
'' Could you really expect to stream down the maximum amount of traffic possible 24/7 and pay the same as checking email once per day? ''
If it says unlimited, then yes. My ISP offers contracts with a limit of 2 GB, 6 GB, and 30 GB per month, at different cost. I have a 6 GB contract. If I went with a competitor who offers "unlimited", then I would expect more than the 30 GB limit that my current ISP offers, and definitely not less than my current 6 GB contract.
Isnt America the free market country? Then be free and dont give them your money, no? Or did I miss something?
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
If you think that's bad, to Vodafone UK, "unlimited" means 15Mb. Yes mega, though that's per day, not per month. It also doesn't include IM, VOIP or P2P. This is according to their new price plans that start in June, with a "£1 per day flat rate for internet usage".
'' I agree that they should not be allowed to market it as 'unlimited' if it's not, but saying that 5GB is too little is just insane. ''
5 GB is too little when you sell it as "unlimited".
Nobody would complain if they advertised and sold it as "limited to 5 GB per month".
Whether or not it's "too little" really isn't the issue as far as I'm concerned...
What's too little for one person would be more than enough for another.
The real issue is how they're marketing it; If there is a 5GB limit, then that is a limit... period - hence it is not "unlimited."
I'm sure that it is easier for them to sell it as "unlimited," just like it would make my life a hell of a lot easier if I tell the IRS that I didn't make any money last year and refuse to let them commence their annual financial colonoscopy.
They need to find another name - calling it unlimited is, basically a straight up lie.
Compare this to Papa John's, which is running a special on their website which says: Three Medium, Unlimited Toppings (Maximum Five Toppings per pizza)
To quote Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that hword. I do not think it means what you think it means."
The problem is that they aren't exactly cutting off the customers. They are cutting off their service, certainly, but they are still collecting their money. It would be different if they were to say, actually offer unlimited service, but if someone is using more than 5GB a month, then they use a clause in the contract to drop them as a customer. Instead they cutting off access at 5GB a month, but forcing the customers to keep paying during the 2 year contract period.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
I think you are sort of right. However, lets look at a theoretical example:
You have two customers, one is a light net user. They like to send photo's of their kids around on email to the rest of their family, spread all over the world, and use email as the main means of communicating between their extended family. They shop online, and like to hunt around for cheap flights/holidays. Perhaps they buy the odd small game on-line for the kids.
The other customer is a gamer. They like to play on-line for many hours a day. They download multi gigabyte demos, and have a steam account that they use a lot. They spend a lot of time on Youtube, and use mail and msn constantly.
The first customer can be given a moderatelly capped servive for, say thirty bucks a month (don't know the real US pricing). No problems will arise, they have what they need, you get their money.
The second customer can pay fifty bucks and have a much higher limit, say 100Gb. Even the most intense gamer or movie purchaser is unlikely to exceed that. If they do, you charge in blocks of 10gb, and if it happens a lot, suggest they go to 150Gb, and pay more.
By having a sliding scale of charges you avoid the unfairness of having light users paying the same, or close to the same, as heavy users.
I know many heavy users point at the contracts they got that say unlimited, and wave fists about angrily, but, lets be honest here, few people who download hundreds of gigabytes a month are getting all legal stuff at present. To be frank, it isn't fair that I have to pay the same as someone else who rapes the tubes constantly.
I have an 'unlimited' service, but my ISP looks at their customers with an eye to finding people who download much more then the others, and shifts them to shaped lines, or kicks them to a higher cost service. I can, and have, transferred tens of gigabytes of data around in recent months, I have to. However I am considerate and do it at night, and I cap my transfers so it doesn't max out my line. Although I definitely will show up with a high usage for a short while, on average I still behave myself, and have not been slapped.
How about switching to a fairly decent (only fairly as they are part of Pipex, but seem fairly independent) ISP like Nildram then? They are totally up-front and honest about usage allowances...you get 50gig peak, unlimited off peak, and if you don't use the whole 50gigs peak one month it will roll over once to the next month.
Failing that, go with an Enta reseller like the UK Free Software Network who give a portion of their profits to open source projects.
Back on the subject though, I'm with T-Mobile on their "Web 'n' Walk" plus tarrif and they make it clear that it's a 3GB tarrif that disallows VOIP. For an extra £8 they up you to 10GB and allow VOIP.
That's called being totally transparent, and I'm very grateful they "get it" and show the actual usage terms in plain English for all to see.
I am NaN
If his phone service works anything like my phone, he is probably not downloading /to/ his phone, he's probably downloading /through/ his phone. Windows (and presumably other OSes) sees a phone as an internet connection. My phone can act as a 802.11b access point, or do the same through phone based internet service. I haven't read the license agreement for this fellow's service, but I would assume that to be fair access. Nevertheless, this isn't even the point.
The point is that they advertise the service as unlimited. If it's not unlimited, then that is simply false advertising. We need to hold companies accountable to what they say. And they don't need any help twisting their words to mean the complete opposite of what they say. That have armies of lawyers to do that for them. It is not unreasonable to demand accountability and honesty in the marketplace. Don't let them convince you that it is.
Here in the UK the same thing happens. I am always wary of those services providing unlimited *anything*. That is why I am more comfortable with Google's 3GB or 4GB or whatever space they give against say, yahoo's unlimited, because ALWAYS (show me an advertisement that does not have it) the word UNLIMITED comes with the corresponding '*' attached to it, and in the case of the broadband services they use the "Fair use" policy to trivially limit the bandwidth.
I have also read a lot of times people assuming that the people that download a lot is *pirating* stuff. But with the current rise of multimedia content (VoIP, VoD, online gaming, and the massive amount of flash crap in the web) it is very easy to go over 2GB a month...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
That is a great thought. Too bad it IS my home internet since I can't get cable or dsl at my house (despite a cable line that was run down my street 6 months ago) and dial-up never got me more than 18kbs. Even EVDO was a stretch and I had to get an external antenna to make it work.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
So many people on this thread are talking about downloading movies, calculating what the average bandwidth of college students is, etc....
What they are not addressing is that most people would be using wired bandwidth for these tasks. Wired bandwidth is relatively plentiful, even with the bottlenecks in the local loop. The capacity in the backbones is mostly restricted by the amount of routing, not the capacity of the fibers, which isn't anywhere near full (hear about all that "dark fiber"? New multiplexers? Hmm?)
On the other hand, if you use wireless bandwidth, you're consuming it from a relatively small pool allocated to a cell. There's only so much you can squeeze out of radio bandwidth, which is why it's such a big deal to the cellular networks when the government auction off another slice of spectrum.
Yes, this is false advertising by Verizon. But the real issue is a minority of idiots spoiling the party for everyone else ; you just can't support those usage patterns over current wireless technologies, not for everyone in the cell. They are quite reasonably ticked off with a minority of the customers degrading their service and making them look bad to the rest.
If you want industrial quantities of bandwidth, you should be using a landline, and paying for it.
In an ideal world, marketing would make it very clear what service you were getting, and people would be more respectful of limited common resources, like radio spectrum.
I got this for a contract I was working on, and we regularly got dumps of "representative test data" against which we wrote our software integration tests. At least every couple of days, they would push out a 300MB file. Add to that the fact that I was building our automated software build infrastructure using a tool (maven) that downloads dependencies from central repositories (about 80MB for a full pull of all dependencies), and because I was creating the infrastructure I had to blow my system away to test cleanly several times a day.
I bought it for work, and was presumed to have just been file sharing. I had unpleasant conversations with Verizon. Didn't even have an appeal process, nor an opportunity to demonstrate my situation, nor even the right to ask for a manager. I seriously thought about lodging a small claims court claim for damages, as their cutting me off cost me $1500 in demonstrable lost receipts (i'm paid by the hour) in that week while I tried to research an alternative.
I finally went with Cingular on their unlimited data plan and they never had a problem with any limits. I also made sure we researched the policies and they said they didn't give even the slightest care how much I downloaded, or if I used it for "broadband services" like music/movie downloads, 'cause that's what Broadband usually means. Other than switching to a Mac and having a bit of irritation geting an ExpressCard device to support the service initially, I've had no problems with it.
i.
i - This sig provided by
Sign the petition to stop UK ISPs from advertising unlimited packages when there are in fact hidden caps in their un-Fair Usage Policies
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Unlimited-ADSL/
Even better than unlimited - this one goes to 11 !
You get the idea.
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the America public." - H. L. Mencken
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The Verizon plan in question is marketed towards business professionals who are on the road a lot and need an internet connection for their laptop. Ture, the EVDO card you get with the plan uses the cell phone network to transfer your data. However it is meant to be your laptop's internet connection. Your cell phone does not use this plan at all.
I was on the road for a solid month last year and used their little EVDO card. My company is big enough that we have some exclusive deal where we really do get unlimited bandwidth. Just looking at the emails I downloaded in the first week I think I went over the 5GB. In the emails, there were 4 ppt files, 20 doc files, and 1 xls file. That xls file alone totaled just under 2GB (which is the max file size allowed by our server).
So at least in my case 5GB/month would really not work and I'm lucky to work for a big enough client that they can really get the unlimited bandwith.
The card was so good (speed was very close to my crapcast cable modem) and worked really everywhere (except in some very very very rual parts of Wyoming and Montana) that I was thinking about getting one for my personal use. Then I saw the that not only do you pay a fifty-some dollars a month but there is also a per kilobit charge on top of the monthly fee too. Now that I see there is a 5GB limit, I'm really glad I didn't get one.
Actually, this is intended for a laptop as well. It is intended for PDAs and the wireless broadband laptop cards. The TOS also states that it is not intended to be used as a home (broadband) connection replacement. The plan for PDAs is $45 a month and if you have a voice plan with Verizon, the Access card is $60 per month. If you only have the Access card, and no voice plan with them, it is $80 per month. They say that corporate intranet access is acceptable, but if I connected Citrix at work for much more than 45 minutes or so a day, I would be over very quickly.(I also choke my connection) It works well as remote solution for occasional needs, but I could not survive on 5GB per month. For my normal internet access I would need about 10-15 GB per month. Most of this goes to the occasional remote log in for work. I would need much more if I were to want to do fun things like watch gooTube, stream music, or download ... things.
Yes, we do. It's called "Truth in Advertising," and it's part of the Federal Trade Commission's job to enforce that business don't lie about their services. We also have the Better Business Buerue as a watch group to identify unfair and unethical business practices.
Anyone who's had their service dropped by verizon for the 5GB limit, and isn't hosting a pirating service, should be suing verizon under truth in advertising. When you use the word "Unlimited" in big bold letters on the cover of the plan, you can't lie about it in the fine print.
Sometimes I do 5GB+ in a DAY.
Thank God this stupidity hasn't spread outside the US yet.
However, if someone's advertising campaign gives me a free widget and then later tries to bill me for said widget, we're suddenly in very different legal waters than if my "free" widget came with an expensive service plan that I agreed to (or whatever the hook is). I don't care how jaded you are - there are limits to what companies and their advertisers can do or claim. Its not hard to find examples that comes right up to the edge of that line. But there is still a limit.
The history of marketing is full of examples where marketing was too clever for its own good. The parent brought put forward a rather dubious example of "all you can eat." No individual is going to eat a literal ton of food. But there have been examples where individuals with appetites have surprised marketers. Red Lobster's all-you-can-eat crab promotion resulted in a $3 million dollar hit on their 2003 3rd quarter earnings.
I have one of the biggest ISPs for DSL.
All I had to do was navigate to 3rd level tech support (admittedly a real challenge) to achieve the following:
Unlimited bandwith flag on my account (normally you start to see rate throttling around 4 gigs into the month).
Port 25 open.
Return loss data uploaded to my modem, unlocking that feature set of my modem.
Really wasn't hard to get them to do either, just politely requested each feature with a nominal justification:
Port 25 (I want to use my mailserver, not yours. I understand that you are worried about spam from your network, that's why I'm happy to call and ask you rather than being pissed off you're blocking ports)
Bandwith: (I create and share custom distros over BT, also indy content over BT and HTTP downloads)
Return loss: (I understand what all these numbers mean as I've been in TC R&D for the last 10 years. I won't need to call you over piddly stuff if I have these numbers and the ability to tweak gain at my end)
All in all no problem with bandwith or speed.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I have Cox cable, and although they do a lot of other things right, this isn't one of them. The AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) states monthly upload and download bandwidth limits, but there is no way to check, apart from rolling your own iptables wrapper, how much you've used. You're left with a vague worry that maybe you might be getting close and should put off that big download ...
verizon has a data business to protect (FIOS/DSL) and can't let you use the EVDO service the way that you would DSL service. if you paid to use EVDO the way that you use DSL, you might not buy DSL/FIOS, and that would be bad for profits. double digit growth doesn't happen on it's own you know.
they would love to block more, but all those commie net neutrality hippies would throw a fit. jeez, they act like abusing people's freedom to do what they want with services that they pay for is a crime or something.
the whole reason that there is one phone company and one cable company in 90% of the neighborhoods in america is to keep prices high and competition low. adding an unrestricted wireless data service of any kind would increase competition and lower prices, and that really isn't in verizon's best interest. the TOS for the EVDO service states that you can't use it as a substitute for DSL. just wait, soon they will call "misusing" EVDO a crime. you're stealing DSL service after all.
a lot of you people are already stealing residential phone service by using cell phones as substitutes for landline phone service. verizon is clearly not going to let you steal DSL as well.
at&t and verizon will do everything possible to guarantee that wireless data services are NOT in competition with residential and commercial DSL because those businesses are there to prop up the now useless telephone business. if you want DSL, in most markets, you need to buy a phone line as well. if you can use a mobile phone to make all of your calls AND get highspeed internet access... well you might as well call the telecommunications industry dead and burn the american flag too while you're at it.
someone else quoted this from the TOS:
if your friend lives in an RV, doesn't have DSL, and is using EVDO to get online then he broke the TOS and it sucks to be him. no one puts one over on the phone company. maybe he should drive to some hippy commune where there is muni-wifi.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
truthful advertising... that's a good one. it's also an oxymoron, like "political integrity" or "reality television".
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
just simply get a nice mail system running on a home computer that gets email via POP from Verizon/whoever and has its own webmail interface (e.g. getting an MTA running on a home computer with Apache and PHP running Squirrelmail or the like and having a dynamic DNS service)
/.er maybe, the average Joe Six-gig computer user, no way.
How is this simpler than "www.gmail.com?"
Dynamic DNS, fer Pete's sake. The average
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
I'm using Videotron "Extreme plan" (in Montreal) which is actually unlimited. My record for one month is 960GB and I didn't get any letters or phone calls. Bouyah ;)
Even if you could download your limit in one second and get capped at 14kbps the rest of the month, that's another ~4.5GB of bandwidth. That's all that is possible, so your total is only 14.5GB of bandwidth a month. There's really no such thing as "unlimited" bandwidth, there's always a transfer rate cap. They shouldn't be allowed to call it unlimited, because it never is.
Unlimited could be short for UNbearably LIMITED...
And anyone with gspace installed could easily get past their 5G limit using only email in under a week.
I'm surprised no one is asking why it is that Verizon should want to limit data. I thought - and I may be wrong - that essentially, the total amount of 3g spectrum that is available (i.e. FCC licensed) for U.S commercial exploitation is finite. Meaning, Verizon can't grow the EVDO customer base indefinitely - they WILL hit their total licensed allocation.
The only way to deal w. this, then, is to do exactly what they are doing. If spectrum is limited, and customers are growing, data must be limited. That's it.
What they are "calling" it - who cares.
I pull in 150GB's monthly on my RoadRunner NO PROBLEM
So it makes sense to me why Wireless broadband gets capped.
Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.
Heh, a friend of mine was using the term "shaped". I assumed it was some very regal pronunciation of the word "capped".
Yeah... it sucks. When I said 14kbps, I didn't actually look it up (sorry if I sounded more authorative than I am... someone above said it's actually 64kbps). All I know is that it really isn't usable. Just doing basic web browsing is a major pain. I have to wait for text to gradually appear on the screen.
I can't remember if this is better or worse than what dialup used to be. But I certainly don't remember dialup being this crappy.