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Verizon To Throttle High-Bandwidth Users
tekgoblin writes "Verizon has enacted a new policy today that allows them to throttle 'high' bandwidth users on their network. We're not sure exactly what 'high' means but it is probably over 2GB of data per month. This comes as the iPhone launches on Verizon's network. The policy is said to only affect the top 5% of data users on the network. When these 5% of users hit the soft limit they will be throttled during peak times of the day. From the note sent to customers: 'Verizon Wireless strives to provide customers the best experience when using our network, a shared resource among tens of millions of customers. To help achieve this, if you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand. Our proactive management of the Verizon Wireless network is designed to ensure that the remaining 95% of data customers aren't negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users.'"
Also known as: We don't want to look like AT&T when a shit ton of people start using their iPhone on our network.
...for a moment there I thought I could finally throw away all my choked-by-terrible-awful-service-provider-asphyxiation pr0n.
What we need is to increase the throughput of the internet as a whole by two orders of magnitude. Then, nobody will care what bandwidth you are using. Increasing friction is not the answer. We need to grease the wheels of the internet. Internet2 anyone?
Sounds entirely reasonable.
What i don't understand is why the network providers keep pushing mobile video and tethering.
T-mobile is pushing their video chat... Sprint is saying you can upload live video directly to the web etc.
The networks already can't handle the level of data usage they currently get, yet they're pushing these very high bandwidth services. Don't get me wrong, i like that my t-mo G2 with stock firmware can do wifi and USB tethering. But i would also like it if my "4G" phone on the "4G" network got more than 400kbps download rates (in one of their 4G launch cities). If there's any level of adoption of this stuff it'll bring their networks to a halt and not due to any top 5% users.
Most people understand that there's not enough licensed RF spectrum to let millions of users treat their cell phone as if it were a portable 20 Mb/sec cable connection running uTorrent and Netflix 24/7 at 100% saturation. So why don't the carriers advertise their service with a flat rate, but with terms like "3 Mb/s for the first 2 GB transferred per billing period, 500 kb/s for the next 2 GB, and 128 kb/s after that"?
Seems this would allow them to stick to the spirit of the law when it comes to "unlimited" service offers, while keeping the network from being either too congested or too expensive.
But at least they did it before you bought your phone, not afterward.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Have two queues: Low latency and Bulk. Use the ToS field is decide which one to put it in. Give customers two quotas, say 2gb bulk and 500mb low latency. Charge more for extra low latency traffic and less for extra bulk traffic. Don't use IP addresses, transport protocols or port numbers to decide what is real time and what is bulk. That would be a fair system for making the best use of limited network resources.
This seems like a much better choice for bandwidth management than the UBB BS that is happening. Until the infrastructure catches up with video demand I can understand a little of sacrifice for other people.
Truth is a matter of perspective. Wear the other guy's shoes before you dismiss him.
Assuming usage stays fairly constant for each user per month... wont think eventually bring down their average usage over time? The first month, top 5% are scaled back, and you assume as the throttling continues into the next month, they will no longer be the top users. So then there is a new top 5%... and these users are using less than what last month's top 5% used... as they get carried over in the next billing cycle, this continues until it hits some threshold...
insight through the mind
Look at this way. Verizon is already giving the user a slower data rate than iPhone users have come to expect. Now they are saying if you use 'too much' as defined by them, you may be effectively cut off. After all, the definition of 'too much' and 'throttling' is defined completely by Verizon. Previously 'too much' was 150 MB, and who knows what throttling is. Maybe Edge?
This reinforces my previous expectation that though Verizon has the best network in the US, they will never give the average customer a square deal or straight answer.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
So why not run fiberglass cable from tower to tower, and increase the number of towers? I run a Verizon Wireless hot spot (5 connections at home), but I'm not wedded to the plan I've got (5 GB per billing cycle, which is nothing like 24/7 unlimited). There needs to be a little Federal oversight of these practices. Or a lot of Federal oversight...
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
What I never understand is how all those companies can get away with showing ads with happy people who use tons of video streaming, internet radio/music/video download shops and other highish bandwidth stuff, claim "sign up here and enjoy all these awesome things!", when the reality is that if you actually DO use all this stuff every day, you are told to stop doing that because you are an asocial bandwidth hog.
Either advertise it and let people do it, or don't advertise it. And especially do not advertise it if you know from the start that it is not technically possible for lots of people to use these options because your network is not good enough.
Oh wait, you're using too much!
Here's your half a bridge!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"The policy is said to only affect the top 5% of data users on the network."
So, if every data customer bands together and chips in an additional ~5.3% of their plan to buy "dummy" plans, they can then set up these 5% of phones to waste ungodly amounts of bandwidth, guaranteeing that these dummy plans get throttled, thereby saving the remaining real users from experiencing any throttling.
I'm sure that's not a ToS violation...
5% - It seems small at first, but when you realize that they have 94.1 million subscribers in the US, that's 4.7 million people they're throttling. If they identify that number of people as using "extraordinary amount[s] of data", I'd say that there's a more fundamental problem here.
And note the part where you get throttled for your entire next billing cycle too.
I'm not a Verizon subscriber, and I still use a "dumb" phone without a data plan, but this still seems that they need to change what they're offering up front instead of giving everything and then taking it back if you dare use it.
Fifteen bucks a gig? And the USERS are the bad guys here?
Nice idea, and one that is auto-ratcheting, with the ultimate effect to drive data volumes down all across the subscriber base. This month, the top 5% get throttled. Next month, the next lower volume tier may now define the top 5%, and that gets throttled. Ultimately, data volumes approach zero, and someone still gets throttled because there's always a top 5% who are the worst. And all along, Verizon can claim it's only the worst bandwidth users getting punished. It's like the system we use here at work to get rid of the low performers... There's always a bottom 10%!
Bloody hell! I'm already dealing with a 5 gig cap and now they want to throttle me???? I rarely watch even short videos to keep within my 5 gig cap. Software and OS updates and light surfing burns up 5 gig a month. Because of the new iPhone users I have to deal with throttling? My area lacks high speed so I'm stuck using a Verizon Mifi for my internet service. My last place had super fast cable so it's been painful enough. If they can't deliver what they promised then are they going to cut my rates??? The idea that 95% use less than 2 gig is laughable. Basically all they are prepared to service is light smart phone surfing. By adding Mifi and iPhone they maxed their system and now the users get to pay the price.
Just wait USA, 1st it starts with your cell phone, then it will move up to your hardwired service. We are almost at the point of having to pay $3 per gigabyte on our hardwired DSL/Cable lines.
Soon there will be no such thing as unlimited bandwidth here, and everything will be user based billing per GB.
Honestly I'm having a hard time finding fault with this so long as it's spelled out in advance in the contract that one agrees to. The problem is springing this after the fact.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
As long as they clearly define:
o exactly when customers will be throttled
o exactly how much customers will be throttled
o allow customers to see how much they been throttled for each month
o allow customers to opt out of their contract without penalty if they don't
agree to the change
Seems perfectly reasonable if they did that.... Not holding my breath :-)
My wife purchased her Droid Incredible from Verizon last summer. She is totally thrilled with it and her unlimited data plan. With it, she is able to look up facts and answer questions where ever she is. It has proven to be a real assist.
She uses it to listen to Pandora while she is at work. Her employer allows 0 bandwidth for personal uses, so she spends the entire 8 hours per day listening to Pandora on 3G.
At 128Kbps, 8hours/day * 22 days per month works out to 10GB/month, and that is just listening to music, not watching any video or doing any web browsing.
2GB/month is totally inadequate for anything but browser lookups. It is not sufficient for any of the media-rich apps for which Verizon advertised the device.
and it just happens to also make us more money. But it's really about service, not money . . . for reals.
I'm reading this while downloading a windows 7 iso over my G1's 3g connection at 4mbps. The image is well over 2 gigs. No caps for me. :)
zosxavius photography
I mean, they are having a massive upgrade to their infrastructure to handle their customers properly, right? Surely they don't expect to add many more customers with increasing bandwidth demands without upgrading their infrastructure.
Alright, so tens of millions? Let's be nice and say by "tens" they meant "ten". 10,000,000 x .05 = 500,000. So at a bare minimum, assuming they are stretching, they are going to throttle for 500,000 people. Now for some Google-fu, looks like Verizon is at about 92,000,000 customers. They plan to throttle 4,600,000 users, with a throttle that lasts over a month, regardless of changes in behavior.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Just sayin'. Verizon has lots of home users at 25/15 Mbps down/up, I hope they aren't throttling us to 2 GB/month.
rooooar
High-bandwidth users to throttle Verizon.
if i PAY for something, i expect to be able to USE it.
if you sell/rent a car to me, and then tell me that i can not use it on mondays, i shove the keys up your ass. if you drop a shady clause in the contract saying that you can modify the terms of the contract at any point at your leisure, then do the mondays thing after that, i still shove up the keys up your ass.
so at this point, i am at a loss to understand, how can american corporations violate the very BASE mechanics of trade and business, and get away with it.
Read radical news here
The "throttling" approach strikes me a bogus.
Most of the problem occurs at "the edge". (And if it's congested in "the core" you need more core.) So why not just divide the instantaneous bandwidth evenly among all users?
With this approach the high-usage users are not throttled when they're not interfering with other users when the edge is not congested, and get no more than an equal share with the intermittent users when it is congested.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
When they say 5%, isn't it possible they mean .05%?
This is already being done by ISPs in Australia. I'm a 10GB per day user on a 12GB monthly plan. It sucks.
Let me show you my thing; it's the most advanced on the planet.
Over the last few years we have seen an acceleration of this type of nonsense. A couple years ago we were seeing it in the cellular phone world, where all of asudden every provider decided that *unlimited* plans were misnamed because uh... they had limits. Users would sign up for an unlimited talk and txt plan for 100 and the end of the month would recieve a 200$ bill.
As with any oligopoly there were no real unique plans for users to choose from, it was the same doublespeak from all of the providers.
As we see happening today with many data and bandwidth providers
But there is hope, as we saw in the cellular world, some people heard the hue and cry and rushed to meet thier needs. Public mobile, wind mobile etc began to offer truly unlimited plans and cause the many people to switch to companies that don't subsidize your phone, but also don't lock you in to bullshit contracts.
The real danger is that the FCC allows this oligopoly to block competition (as the cellular companies, of which Verizon was one, tried to do).
Data plans are simply to profitable for the market not to try and fill something so many people will pay for, like an unlimited plan, the question is if it gets the chance....
sig loading.......
The 95% that isn't considered 'high data'? Most of them are still on "dumbphones".
Sorry: we don't want more cost just for data. We have computers. We have the internet. We're already paying as much as we want to: this is a recession.
If you want to pull people onto data networks (nevermind that Verizon's wireless data is slow as shit), you're going to have to a) make it appealing and b) make it low/no cost. This isn't 2005, when people still had teh conception that America wasn't utterly imploding. This is 2011. Most of us realize that shit is getting deep: $3.25+ gas isn't going away; 20%/year food costs aren't going to stop, and an annual 10-30% increase in taxes is the new norm. We're not going to throw $30+ more a month at a 'data service' which isn't - if our one single friend with disposable income, who took the jump, is to be trusted, that is.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The RF spectrum at "the edge" does not work like that and I doubt it ever will work like that.
Also, unless you want to stay in one place the rest of your life and have your freedoms curbed like that, the number of users per cell is constantly changing. So, even if you do "equally share" the bandwidth at 'the edge", the bandwidth you get would constantly change as people move in and out of the cell.
Think about it.
Any lawyers here to start a class action lawsuit for false advertising?
Because those high-usage users are "using 95% of the bandwidth" (even though most of that's during non-peak times), so it's only right that they should be PUNISHED, DAMN IT! when they keep downloading when I want bandwidth.
Seriously, your solution is exactly right, from a network engineering perspective. From a business perspective, though, when 5% of your customers are using 95% of your service and generating perhaps 10% of your revenue, the solution isn't "allocate traffic fairly to all customers", it's "find a way to piss these customers off so they leave us without bothering the other 95%", and reminding the 95% that the top 5% are USING YOUR BANDWIDTH allows them to do just that.
Either advertise it and let people do it, or don't advertise it. And especially do not advertise it if you know from the start that it is not technically possible for lots of people to use these options because your network is not good enough.
No, see you aren't supposed to do that *all the time*!
You're just supposed to watch Youtube videos while riding on horseback with your girlfriend on the beach, or while at work as a bellboy at a nice hotel. The commercial was pretty clear on this.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
IANANE (network engineer), but aren't the limits of wireless bandwidth indirectly proportional to the density of cell towers? If there were twice as many cell towers (and the cells themselves 1/4 the size), couldn't you handle much more cell phone traffic? Once you get to the tower, the bandwidth is only limited by the amount of pipe you lay, not the physics of electromagnetism.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
What kind of network cable only has five pins??
What the hell has happened to this place?!
This had already been hacked. Check the bandwidth limit fix at any android forum.
The story, as written, simply says that Verizon has announced that it is going to do something that I'm sure they've always done, and which every single other competent network administrator also does.
For anyone that runs a network, keeping said network usable and orderly for your customers (in mass) is job 1, whether implicitly or explicitly.
Their policy is simple and clear. The headline should read "Verizon enacts surprisingly good network management policy".
I couldn't agree with this more! I've stayed away from the true smart phones and barely touch the internet on my phone (I have the 25MB/month plan) because I know that if I used it the way I would want to, I would be hitting usage limits within a few weeks each month. On top of that, I also figure I'd be sucking the battery power down to nil in under 8 hours.
bandwidth throttles you. :-)
Same with United's Frequent flier program. They advertise that you can get to Alaska for 25,000 miles, but I have tried numerous times and haven't been successful. And there is no one to help you. Very frustrating and time wasting. And no one cares.
They either do this, or everyone just gets slower speeds. When you are dealing with wireless it isn't near as easy to scale up bandwidth as with wires. With a wire you can always add a second wire, or you can switch to a new kind of wire (or ultimately optical cable) that can take a higher range of frequencies. You could also do things like use better equipment to raise SNR.
You can't do that with wireless. The frequencies are fixed by the technologies in use and the allocations. You get a certain slice of the spectrum and that's it. Even then, you can't just expand it arbitrary. The properties of EM radiation changes with frequency. At a few 10s of Hz, you can transmit right through the entire Earth... and take a few seconds per character. At a GHz or so you can get pretty good medium range line-of-sight transmission and penetrate buildings to some extent. Speed is ok too. At a couple hundred GHz you get fantastic bandwidth, but even the air (or rather the moisture in it) is a significant attenuator and forget passing through walls. At a few hundred THz, well guess what that is light. So the bandwidth (as in range of frequencies, analog bandwidth) for any given device is limited and cannot be arbitrarily expanded..
SNR is also something you can't do much about. You could boost transmission strength, more signal = better SNR, but then nobody wants to carry around a car battery to power a hundred watt transmitter, never mind that it wouldn't do all that much good.
The only real thing you can do is subdivide the areas down smaller, have more base stations. Fair enough and worth doing but there are practical limitations to how dense you can pack them, never mind the cost.
So for my cable modem, when more bandwidth is needed, all the cable company has to do is add channels. Each 6MHz channel gives around 38mbps of throughput. They have about 160ish of them (most cable networks are 1GHz total bandwidth) so even with the video services, I don't feel bad about saying "They should just provide more if things are getting congested."
Not so lucky with cellphones. They all have to share the airwaves. Each provider only gets a small slice, and all the slices come from the same general frequency ranges. It isn't like Verizion gets 1.5Ghz-2Ghz and Sprint gets 2Ghz-2.5Ghz, it is more like they all share small bits of the 1.9Ghz space.
As such Shanon's Law is a real bitch and limits what you can have. Obviously there's work on new technologies, better encoding, using newly opened up frequency ranges (like the former TV channels) and so on. However for a given technology, a given cell network, there are real bandwidth limits you have to deal with.
I think this is the right way of dealing with it because it addresses the actual problem. The problem isn't total transfers, it is congestion. So rather than setting a low limit period, you let people transfer what they like, but if they do a lot throttle them down during peak times when congestion is high.
Shared resource? You pay through the nose for a service, you should be able to use it. They didn't expand their network to keep up with the demands of new technologies... that's their problem. I don't imagine a lot of people are serving porn sites off their iPhones. I know Verizon certainly isn't as reasonable as they're expecting us to be when you ask them to do something like, say for example, stop billing you for the phone line you'd deactivated when you moved from your old apartment 6 months ago.
FYI -- the 94.1M subscribers includes many people without a data plan, i.e. I seriously doubt 4.7M people will be subject to throttling.
Further, I think this is actually a great idea and I already bought some iphones from verizon. I'd much rather have a responsive and reliable connection and be within a 2 gb limit than have no limit and tons of dropped calls (in certain markets at least) like with AT&T.
In certain markets, even without a limit, the poor quality of AT&T's network wouldn't even allow a user to get to 2 gigs.
my 1.5 cents
in soviet russia you throttle verizon.
Using an iPhone on the Telus network in Ontario on a "Flex" plan. Start at 1GB and move up from there! 1 - > 2 for $20 extra, 2 -> 5 for $20 after that. The plan naturally fits my bandwidth needs with no throttling. Tethering at no charge by the way. I've also seen 150KB/s both up and downstream on our 3G network tethered. Works for me. -Brian
I don't mind doing that, but I do mind them doing that and then calling their plan "Unlimited." Perhaps we should petition the FTC for a precise definition of the word "Unlimited", along with some very strict regulations regarding its use.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Ah, you're right, I seem to have glossed over the part about "5% of data users", it won't be nearly as many affected. But 5% is still a lot - with a percentage that large it's likely that you yourself or someone you know is one of them.
I'm on AT&T now, and I only get reception in one corner of my apartment if I stand next to the window. In the hallway outside my lab it drops connection, but in the lab itself it's fine (basement of an engineering building at a well known university). We can go on for a while here about the problems with other networks, but the point I was trying to make is that 5% is not a trivial number. This will affect a lot of people, and a number that high being called "extraordinary" is odd. When compared to other statistics like server uptime or even the uptime of your landline, "extraordinary" only comes into play in fractions of a percent.
Somehow i think Slashdot is the wrong demographic. All of the users here are probably in that 5% :)
We're not sure exactly what 'high' means but it is probably over 2GB [Citation Needed] of data per month.
Seriously, where does this 2GB a month guess come from? Why couldn't it be over 5 GB or over 20 GB to reach the top 5%? If it turns out the top 5% are actually downloading well over 100GB a month, or something like that, I don't really HAVE a problem with them being throttled!
Hey, text messages are data!
Get your wife an mp3 player or portable RADIO... it gets unlimited music 24/7 has a wide range of stations available including providing traffic reports before she gets in her car to drive home. Better yet how about a mp3 player with a BUILT in radio.
I've been listening to radio for decades and never once has someone limited the bandwidth I can consume, nor compressed the tunes I listen to...
then why are they throttling certain users at all times (both peak and non-peak)?
If I were to only use data mode during non-peak hours but was still in the top 5%, I'd still be throttled, and it would do absolutely nothing to help their peak demand since I'm only using it at non-peak times. Sorry guys, this just doesn't work to solve the stated problem.
Wireless bandwidth is not cheap - there should be no Unlimited plans at all. The plans should be in a loose relationship with the real costs, otherwise the overuse of the plan is causing losses - if an extra GB costs an extra 1$ go ahead, charge it and spend the money to extend the network. But why throttle? This is so socialist...
2011 will be known as the "Year of Wireless Hell". Virgin "Unlimited" Broadband2Go has just pulled the same crap on it's users starting Feb 15. I RAN to Walmart to return the antenna I had to buy from them to get their service.
Comcast Canada were full 3% of the time, yet they insisted that they had to throttle abusers of their network because the heavy users were degrading the experience of the others.
When they complain about being over-used when it turns out to be only 3% of the time, what makes you think that it is bandwidth limits that are the problem?
Text I got from T-Mo the other day, after the wife had to use my phone for Netflix\Hulu access:
Free T-Moble Message: Due to the amount of data you have used this billing cycle, your data speed will be slowed for the remainder of the cycle.
Garbage.
reasonably, IMO
FOR THE RECORD:
Verizon and Verizon Wireless are not the same company. This into to this item leads one to believe Verizon is monitoring and not Verizon Wireless.
It is important to note that this only applies to new contracts and only throttles at peak times. The part about also throttling the next billing cycle seems shady, but otherwise I don't see an issue here as long as they aren't altering existing contracts like we've seen other carriers do. The scarier part from the article is that they appear to be trying to do on the fly transcoding of content as it crosses the network resulting in what will likely be a quality drop for people who are good at noticing such things though it could potentially help in the case of higher bandwidth streams being reduced server side to a bandwidth the system can support. Will largely depend on their implementation I guess. www.verizonwireless.com/vzwoptimization has more info apparently.
AJ Henderson
Ugh, they are going to further compress images so you won't be able to zoom in on images without lost detail (atleast if delivered on port 80). I guess this is easy enough to get around using an SSL tunnel, but still a pain to deal with. All recognizable video will be H264 encoded. That could actually be nice if they do it properly. If your device can't handle H264 then it is delivered under the original codec so it does appear to be device aware optimization. Bit rate settings seem to be percentage of original based so higher quality sources will still result in higher quality output (seems like a bad decision for their encoding hardware since it will have to deal with larger files). VBR encoding will be used. They are using VQM for the qualitative measurements and are adjusting the compressing for a .4 to .6 VQM scale change.
Another weird possible issue is that they are using source independent caching of video based on (presumably a hash) of the first few frames of video. Potentially you could end up with the wrong version of a file if the same start is used with changes further in on certain file formats. That could be fun...
Eek, also trying to prevent device side buffering (by limiting data delivery until shortly before the device needs that part of the video) so any unforeseen network latency will result in issues for client devices if they don't have their tolerances set high enough. This makes sense since it prevents caching video that someone may not finish viewing and won't have a negative effect if tweaked conservatively enough, but has the potential to introduce issues for users if it isn't.
AJ Henderson
Is this about mobile wireless service or home internet service? If the latter 2GB/mo is incredibly bad, cant comment on mobile usage as I just use my cell phone as just that.. a phone
This approach ends up negatively impacting far more users. How do you determine if a session is open on stateless traffic? If I do a quick e-mail update do you keep my bandwidth (that I'm not using at all) available for some period of time? You would end up with most users not using near their entire pipe and this would result in huge amounts of wasted bandwidth that could have been used to improve the experience of not just the heavy users, but also the moderate and potentially even some of the low bandwidth users. It's a good thought in principal but it doesn't really work well unless you can predict the random access needs of everyone. A better approach might be throttling that automatically kicks in only if bandwidth utilization gets high on a tower, which may be what they mean by peak times. The posting was not clear if peak times and locations refer to set times or if it is simply done on the fly based on usage data.
AJ Henderson
The phone part drains the PDA's battery while not in active use; the huge screen drains the phone's batteries while used for non-communication. This interference is not necessarily considered tolerable
I mentioned this in a comment in another smartphone topic in the past week. Someone replied recommending buying an extra battery, even if this is an external battery that recharges the internal battery.
More importantly, owning a 200 EUR PDA and a 30 EUR phone on prepaid is much cheaper
Unless you get into Android PDAs, which Google hasn't been officially allowing onto the Market in the United States. Archos 43, for example, is limited to the much smaller AppsLib. The only PDA I can think of that shares an app store with a popular smartphone is Apple's iPod touch.
increase the number of towers
Land is expensive, and there are too many vocal NIMBYs who don't want a tower anywhere near them.
Verizon claims over 100 million connections. 5 million people is hardly a few to me.
Verizon, of their own free will, marketed an unlimited data plan. My wife accepted their offer. What other considerations are there?
Verizon Wireless is not obligated to re-offer the unlimited data plan when the current contract expires, is it?
These high bandwidth users will be compensated and have their bills reduced according to the throttling that they endure, right?
I mean, they're paying for a service and are being denied it during certain periods, in which case they should be compensated.
~Syberz
I thought this would be a report of that dork with the glasses knocking on people's doors, grabbing them by the throats, and screaming, "Can you breathe now, motherfucker?!!!"
Look, quit your whining! What you clearly fail to understand is that Verizon is actually HELPING you by
I meant: Then let them negotiate access to a nearby Wi-Fi AP with its owner. Many restaurants would be happy to oblige.
The RF spectrum at "the edge" does not work like that and I doubt it ever will work like that.
Given that the base station allocates timeslots to outgoing traffic it can divide those timeslots evenly among all users with traffic toward them when dequeueing and transmitting traffic from their per-destination queues. This produces appropriate backpressure on the router's per-destination queues and results in packet drops when the incoming traffic overflows the queues (and other signaling, such as RED) just like a constant bit-rate link to the users would.
The only thing that's special about how RF works (from a bps-allocation standpoint) is that stations more distant from the base station or in a more noisy environment may have been configured for a lower bit/bandwidth modulation variant. The carrier would have to decide whether to divide things evenly on the basis of bit rate (giving the distant/noisy customers a larger slice of the cell's available spectrum) or bandwidth usage (dividing the spectrum usage equally and penalizing customers who are distant or have bad radio environments). IMHO, because station site selection is the carrier's choice (and because it's easier to implement) the choice should be to evenly divide the bit rate.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
As the folks at the local Verizon Wireless store told me when I went in to (try to) pay my Verizon (now Frontier?) phone bill, they are different companies.
in socialism, you USE what you work for, and noone can alienate that right from you.
socialism has NO relevance with 'someone determining whats best for everyone'. socialism is everyone owning equal share in everything. it is NOT something political. what you speak of is in regard to planning and centralization, and it can be like that, or the other way in ANY given political system. feudalism was totally decentralized, yet, still it was not democratic. and you couldnt decide anything.
socialism is EVERYONE owning EQUAL share in everything that exists on earth. nothing more, nothing less. you can make the planning process democratic, or antidemocratic. that is entirely an irrelevant matter.
please, learn about what you are going to talk about first, then talk. dont talk with hearsay of right wing talking heads on tv, else, you come up like the moron who attempted to mail a puppy through usps and expect it to make the destination alive.
Read radical news here
They didn't say how they are taking the top 5%. Is it the top 5% of the nation, the city, district, or tower? It's like hearing an interest rate without telling you how it is compounded, completely worthless data.
you're totally right, 5% does seem to be a lot
that said, if it makes the network usable then it's a good sacrifice
besides, I have access to wifi most of the time anyway and this new policy is a first step to charging peak/off peak for data which has been done for voice for greater than a decade
Had AT&T provided a similar communication I believe their network could have been managed better. This is a great bit of marketing - showing that 5% of the users can impact the experience of 95% of users. While the 5% may be more vocal - the silent majority finally wins. Kind of like Tea Party protesters prior to losing all those elections.
My Opinion –
First: Let’s be sure and have Verizon explain exactly what a 'high bandwidth user' means
Second: Since this seems to come due to the” iPhone” launche on Verizon's network. Their policy “is said” it would only affect the top 5% of data users on their network.
So what is their policy? And are they going ID and notify each person now identify as such?
Third: If these 5% of ID’d users hit a “soft” limit are they to be notified in real time as this event occurs regardless of the time of the day?
Fourth: When they hit this soft wall for the premium service they are paying for and get this service “THROTTLED” will the premium price they are paying for also get THROTTLED?
If 'Verizon Wireless strives to provide their customers the “best experience when using their network” which like any cellular provider is a shared resource among tens of millions of customers that should also be true of how they are billed for their service plan.
Why should ANYONE pay for a premium service 100% of the time and only get it part of the time.
The customer should ALWAYS get what they are PAYING FOR, so if the service you are paying for is throttled your billing rate should be as well otherwise you are paying for something you are not getting and that can also be called FALSE ADVERTISING sometimes also know as STEALING!
I use a 3G USB Modem as my primary internet service.
It's due for a contract renewal and a modem upgrade.
So I was talking to Verizon about this story while discussing my upgrade options.
Their sales representatives say that this 2GB triggered throttle is only applied to smartphone devices, likely only to the unlimited plan.
The fixed cap plans such as the 5GB monthly that I am currently using will not be included in the throttle.
i would think that that would constitute Verizon changing their end of the contract thus releasing the customer from the contract. i wonder what different song Verizon would be singing if all of their customers would start jumping ship.