Verizon CEO Says "We Will Hunt Heavy Users Down"

Zerocool3001 writes "In an interview with WSJ editor Alan Murray,Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg talks about how the FCC's broadband access studies are wrong (and the US is definitely 'number one, not even close'), how he had someone else stand in line for him Saturday to pick up his iPad, and how Verizon will soon hunt down, throttle and/or charge high-bandwidth users on its network."

Comments

Come to Verizon!

[butterflysrage]

Pay out the nose for our high speed internet! but if you dare use that speed we will lock you up.

Re:Come to Verizon!

[Runaway1956]

He's laid more fiber from Washington to Boston than all of Europe. Hmmm. He's probably telling the truth. If Verizon has laid one mile of fiber somewhere between Washington and Boston, and they don't own a single foot of fiber in Europe, then he's technicaly telling the truth. Or, if we choose to look at that another way, European telcos have not put down any fiber between Washington and Boston - so Verizon has laid more fiber than all of Europe.

But, he's obviously trying to claim that Verizon owns more fiber between those two cities than all of the governments and telcos in Europe have ever put down, combined, in Europe. Which seems pretty preposterous. I'm willing to bet without even googling that is a lie.

BUT, from everything our European freinds write here and elsewhere, their service covers them EVERYWHERE. Gigabyte service even out in the boonies. Our boonies still depend on dial up phone modems.

The braggart loses, no matter how we slice and dice his comments.

Re:Come to Verizon!

[ircmaxell]

They never said your connection had an unlimited number of bytes.

True, but they never said that I should expect otherwise either (except deep into the fine print). It's all about what the average person expects, not what they find reasonable. If an ad said "This car gets 400mpg", the average person would expect it to mean 400mpg averaged over a tank not an instantaneous value at some point in time. I guess my question is if you said "This plan has 15mb/s" to the average person, would they expect that to be the peak instantaneous transfer rate, or would they expect it to be the average value over a period of time (that you could transfer approximately 4.8TB over the course of a month)? I would think the latter. Plus, if you look at datacenters and web hosts, they explicitly state that you get 200gb of transfer on a 100mbps link, or a 100mbps link billed at 98%, or a unlimited 100mbps link. If I just told you that you were purchasing a 100bmps link, which would you (the average person) infer from that? I would assume one of the latter two, since 200gb is a LOT more limiting than 100mbps (and hence would normally be the disclosed factor). And that's the whole point...

Re:Come to Verizon!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing you have 1 Mbit judging by your numbers? That might be fine for you, but seeing as 100 Mbit is the lowest I could get even if I tried here in Sweden, I can't imagine going back to what I had literally 14(!) years ago. And no, I'm not saying I need 1 Gbit/s (my current speed) 24/7, however, once you experience how fast your every day Internet becomes, there's no turning back.

Re:Come to Verizon!

[MaWeiTao]

Pretty much every other nation on Earth has a more homogeneous culture than the United States. This is reflected in the fact that entertainment is more diverse in terms of content and cultural appeal.

Neither is the US more monolingual than most European or Asian nations. Head down to the DMV and you can probably get a test in most languages. In most other countries you might get English if you're lucky.

I do agree with you that the US has a higher level of affluence than most nations. Actually, it's more accurate to say Americans have more disposable income, probably because they get to keep more of what they earn. Japan is one of the exceptions, which is why they've got such a strong market and my companies that make consumer products thrive there.

Dishonest

[clone53421]

If they don’t want people to use the bandwidth they’re given, they shouldn’t advertise that they offer that much bandwidth.

Re:Dishonest

[TubeSteak]

Murray: You didn't stand in line on Saturday? [For an iPad]

Seidenberg: No, I had somebody else stand in line. (Laughter.) But we had people standing in line.

With that sense of entitlement, I'm not surprised he's so angry with heavy downloaders using their service to its fullest.

Oh No, you're using the service you paid for!

[Skarecrow77]

That is unacceptable!!

Now would you like to buy a bigger bandwidth package that we won't let you use? How about switching to FIOS, the best bandwidth in the country outside of a T3... that we still don't want you to use.

Yea. please tell me where are the

[unity100]

morons who were arguing it was better to let companies 'regulate themselves' ?

now the people will be 'hunted down, throttled/charged' for the service they have ALREADY PAID FOR, in full.

Re:Throttle me?

[dwiget001]

When customers become "the enemy", the company needs to find something better to do with it's resources, IMHO.

Re:want more bandwidth?

[Qzukk]

then pay for it.

If you sell me an "up to" 1mbps connection, then I've paid for up to 1mbps. If you want to sell me a 250MB/mo connection, go right ahead and do that.

Don't sell me an "up to" 1mbps connection then come along and claim that its actually 250MB/mo and send your sockpuppets to demand that I pay more.

Just like insurance companies...

[RyanFenton]

The basic story here is the same with insurance company representatives commenting about the state of US healthcare...

It's all about finding a very small selected slice of data that shows "We're #1 in the world!!!1!!ONE!", in this case about internet access (thanks to legacy phone modems), then pretend that misrepresented data represents the entire market.

But the bullshit only starts there - the REAL problem, it is asserted, are the people who "exploit" the service provided to them, in order to actually ask that full service advertised be provided to them. You know, like insurance customers who actually get sick and need financial support promised to them - those folks, and people who watch too many videos are the REAL problem with the system!

So, serving the interests of the real valued customer, the stockholder, they proclaim a holy jihad against the users of their service who don't give them good enough return in terms of contracted usage of service. Same scam, different sector.

Ryan Fenton

Re:want more bandwidth?

[mikkelm]

Product focus shifted from metered Internet connectivity to unmetered connectivity ten years ago. The ISPs are making a killing off of unmetered services; much more than they would with metered products. That means that your grandparents who check their inbox once a week pay just as much as the guy with the box running fifty consecutive torrents at all times. So what if you pay by the gigabyte? Then these ISPs would cease to generate profit.

And they told us consolodation was good...

[GPLDAN]

When the big guys (AT&T and Verizon) killed the Northpoints and the Rhythms of the world, because they froze them out of co-lo arrangements, and made access to CO's as difficult and as painful as possible, and used lobbyists to push for legal changes and litigated like hell.

And in 2005, when MCI and Verizon merged, and the NY PSC said "ok, well at least allow naked DSL to our citizens:, you know all Seidenberg did was extend and pretend, just wait out the 30-day memory of the American press and public, then just set about killing competition again. (Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=165700989)

Verizon and FIOS will give it to you sideways, and you will smile and like it. Because, you didn't do anything to fight the mergers, call your congressperson, get out there and stop market consolidation when it was clearly headed this way in 2005. Maybe you were too busy playing Everquest, but all I know is that the efforts I put to write letters were up against an onslaught of Verizon lobbyists and attorneys. And guess who won?

After health care, the teabaggers would go apeshit if the US-DOJ Antitrust stepped in and forced another set of breakups in telecom. But, in truth, it's what needs to happen to get back options as a consumer. Read it and weep.

Re:And they told us consolodation was good...

[theaveng]

>>>the teabaggers would go apeshit if the US-DOJ Antitrust stepped in and forced another set of breakups in telecom

No I wouldn't.

The breakup of AT&T Monopoly was one of the best things to happen, but only because it gave us choice in our telephone services. If the Comcast or Verizon Monopoly are broken apart, what would it achieve? We'd still be stuck with just one cable down the middle of the street.

What we really need is 10-20 cables running down the middle of the street, each one offering a different ISP. Imagine the present: Comcast or Verizon. Imagine the future: Comcast or Cox or Time-Warner or AppleTV or MSN or Verizon or Quest or Mediacom or Google ISP or.....

Of course that won't happen so long as local governments keep insisting upon holding a monopoly.

Re:want more bandwidth?

[rsborg]

my gas, water, electric are metered.

You do realize that all of those are public utilities, and if not run by the government, are regulated heavily?

Once you add decent, enforced regulation, I'd be happy with metered access. Til then, no fucking way I'm going to Comcast/Verizon/ATT pad their profits because they happen to, between them, have 90% of all broadband and mobile internet (last mile) access.

Bandwidth: A Real Estate Analogy

[jwietelmann]

1. I rent a vacation home from Verizon.
2. I decide that I like the vacation home so much that I move in full-time. Verizon happily continues to accept my rent.
3. Memorial Day weekend comes. 20 families show up with their kids.
4. It turns out that Verizon rented the same house to 20 other people.
5. Verizon slaps me with a surcharge for "over-using" the house that I rented.