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Verizon Now Throttling Top 'Unlimited' Subscribers On 4G LTE
PC Magazine (along with Forbes, Reuters, and others) reports that those on the rightmost edge of the graph for Verizon's "unlimited" 4G LTE service are about to hit a limit: [T]hose in the top five percent of Verizon's unlimited data users (which requires one to pull down an average of just around 4.7 gigabytes of monthly data or so) who are enrolled on an unlimited data plan and have fulfilled their minimum contract terms (are now on a month-to-month plan) will be subject to network throttling if they're trying to connect up to a cellular tower that's experiencing high demand." As the article goes on to point out, though,
[A] user would have to hit all of these criteria in order to have his or her connection slowed down. There are a lot of hoops to jump through, giving even more weight to the fact that Verizon's throttling — while annoying on paper — won't affect a considerable majority of those still holding on to their unlimited data plans.
It doesn't matter. If customers are paying for it, throttling them should be seen as illegal. I've been a Verizon Wireless customer for over a decade and these recent decisions to screw their own customers have led me to the decision I don't want Verizon anything. Not their phones, Internet, anything. Switching to T-Mobil this week.
Limits exist in the Verizon backbones, so they can't sell a truly unlimited plan and let everybody use it. This isn't the switched line network, it's the packet switched network...
Just sounds like QOS if it's only on congested towers. Which makes sense. Although they should be throttling everyone on that tower, not just the people who happen to use a lot of data elsewhere.
I was sent a warning message about this, I'm still grandfathered in on the unlimited plan. I looked at my usage and over 4G of traffic was from facebook... apparently because I was auto-playing videos. Turning this off on an iphone requires you to go to the settings menu on the phone (not, confusingly, the settings menu in the facebook app, but the facebook app settings in the phone settings menu). You can set it to auto-play only on wifi or never.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Then the users. Perhaps every of their customers should begin throttling payments. But coming from an industry where charging both the sender and recipient of the same SMS is the way to do business, not surprising.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
that takes 5 GB per month?
do you HAVE to stream entire movies and music to it?
why not copy stuff to its storage and maybe save some wireless bandwidth?
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
So if it only hits a handful of folks, then the overall improvement on the network will be minimal, right? So what the heck is the point?
Why not take the buttloads of profit you a-holes are making an build out your network instead of coming up with this Rube Goldberg throttling crap?
to lose customers to Sprint.
This is just until the news cycle finds its next shinny bloodbath and moves on. Once that happens, then Verizon will slap the bandwidth cap on all the time in every place. They're just trying to find a way to annoy these people into changing plans or switching to another provider without it making front page news.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Who is Verizon not fucking over? I'm not even their customer and I feel like I need some lube, just from hearing about these things. I would never, ever buy any service from Verizon. Every business they're in, they seem to take pleasure in punishing their customers just for using what they tried to purchase.
It's bad enough dealing with Comcast, but thankfully I don't rely on them for all of my services (despite their best efforts) and Sprint treats me pretty well for cell service.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Even on the unlimited plan with AT&T, I received a message that my data would be throttled because I exceeded 3Gb during the billing period. I was in the process of moving - no wifi at home for a bit - and using Pandora regularly.
Even though I was grandfathered into the unlimited data plan, I was still mildly annoyed that a mere 3Gb would be sufficient cause to throttle my data use. Obviously the network can only handle so much, so the company needs to manage its resources, but throttling should be reserved for those who exceed their plans' data limits. Or for those of us with supposedly unlimited, reserved for those who truly abuse the 'unlimited' - maybe 50 gigs - with that line clearly publicized, not just sprung on the user with a text message.
I'm definitely meeting all the conditions required to be throttled. I'm going to wait until October to see what the impact is for me. Whether or not I stay with Verizon will depend on the severity of the throttling, and how frequently the tower where I live suffers from saturation.
As long as I get at least EvDO speeds (over LTE, for the lower ping and IPv6), I'll probably stay with Verizon and continue my existing usage pattern. I use about 70 to 150 GB per month. I tether with the (legitimate) mobile hotspot feature, enabled by paying an extra $30/mo. I don't have a wireline Internet connection because Comcast is unreliable and doesn't care to fix it, and Verizon, despite telling me in 2007 that we could get FiOS in a matter of weeks, is still only offering us 7 Mbps ADSL.
I usually do most of my downloading/uploading at off-peak hours, anyway. I'm fine with firing off a 25 GB download on Steam at 11 PM and letting it run through the night. It's unlikely to be throttled at that time, because the tower won't be saturated. The population density where I live is strictly suburban (full-size houses, not town homes), so I don't think it'll be saturated very often.
If the throttling gives me so little bandwidth that I can't even stream 720p H264, I'm outta there. Might have to move to an area that has decent wireline service. But I can tell you for certain that it won't be Verizon or any company related to it in any way. Once I decide that Verizon has put the last straw on me, I am not going to spend another penny on that company for the rest of my life, and will go out of my way to ensure that nobody I know spends a penny on them, or at least make them seriously reevaluate their choice of service provider, for both cellular and wireline service.
Verizon's taking a real risk with this. If the throttling is only 50-60% of the normal speed, I probably won't even notice, since my bandwidth needs during prime time are usually modest (720p streaming video might be the MOST I ask for, and in many cases I'll just be surfing the web or coding). If the throttling is 90-95% of the potential throughput, they will convert a long-time advocate (since the Windows Mobile early EvDO days) into a bitter enemy, spewing vitriol and anti-Verizon word of mouth everywhere I go for the rest of my life. Are they prepared to live with that consequence?
Oh, and they'll lose my $700 cash infusion that I supply them approximately yearly when I pay full retail to upgrade my phone. Hope they can live without that, too.
Oh, and my $200/month (family-wide) cellular bill.
Oh, plus the fact that I've successfully convinced tens of people in the past, who already have a suitable wireline connection at home, to subscribe to Verizon limited data plans because they actually do offer more data for less money than their competitors, and the service reliability and availability is second to none.
Dear Verizon: if you're reading this, you better go easy on the throttling. If you don't, look to lose about $10,000 per month in revenue by the time I get done canceling my service and talking to my connections about Verizon and they start pulling the plug. I'm a very convincing and influential person. People follow my lead, especially when it comes to technology. I wonder how many other people like me out there are souring to your business by your anti-consumer practices. Are you really OK with staring into the abyss? Is it really your goal to force people who've loved your company for over a decade to do an about-face and tear you down?
All because you couldn't deploy a few more towers, because cost cutting and the bottom line. That type of reasoning is a plague that needs to be rooted out and eradicated, starting with deporting the MBAs who come up with this shit.
I think $10/GB would be reasonable considering that they charge $30 for 3GB.
I think $10/GB is ridiculous; in South Korea, you can buy 1Gbit/s for $20/month - which would take you about 10 seconds to hit $10.
Given that there are 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour, that's about $360/hour, or $8,460/day, or to put it another way, a quarter of a million dollars for February, and more than that for other months with more days in them.
Tell me again why they are selling other people's packets as if they were metering water, as opposed to renting us pipes for those packets based on pipe diameter, and getting the hell out of the way otherwise?
Throttling my Verizon "Unlimited" 4G LTE would require that I am on a 4G LTE connection. I do a large amount steaming while at work. I work just outside a city of 30k and get a 4G connection about 1% of the time. So most of this usage is a 3G connection:
Jan 2014 3.7GB
Feb 2014 4.8GB
Mar 2014 4.1GB
Apr 2014 5.5GB
May 2014 4.8GB
Jun 2014 3.6GB
Jul 2014 3.8GB
what is this ? An internet plan for ants ?
One fapping session requires at least that amount of bandwidth, and normal human beings do this at least once a day.
So an unlimited plan would have to provide at least 150GB traffic per month only for the porn.
And then you didn't even start working or watching regular kitten videos on youtube.
Unlimited starts at 3,3TB/month for me, or a 95pctile 10Mbps :o
I believe throttling is an appropriate response to this situation, so if you see any Verizon corporate officers, please let me know.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Cell phone networks cost lots of money. Advancing technology has lowered the cost per bit enough to make full blown internet via cell phone somewhat affordable in the first place. Cell phone internet used to be severely constrained.
Voice data is about several kilobytes a second, so 3 gigabytes could be considered half a million seconds, or about 8,000 minutes of voice. The incremental cost of adding extra voice subscribers is low, so with $100, 4 gigabyte plans, I think it is us voice only customers are the ones getting screwed on price.
Yes there are a few preliminary requirements but they are all pretty common.
First off you must have been with Verizon for a few years, great customer loyalty you have got there Verizon...
Secondly you have to have used over 5 gigabytes that month. That is something you can do in about 5 hours, anyone who has even heard of throttling used that or many times that per week...
The last one I know nothing about, but apparently Verizon has enough trouble with infrastructure that they are deploying throttling schemes to get around upgrading their stuff so being connected to one under heavy demand must happen often enough.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
At first I read about Verizon throttling their "unlimited data plan" customers and I got concerned.
But then I read that the throttling will NOT affect the majority of customers who are paying over the odds for an unlimited data plan that they don't actually need. That's good. So long as they're not affected, things are okay. Please go ahead with your plans, Verizon!
Calculate 95th percentile throttle everyone above it, Recalculate new top 5%.
Rinse. Repeat... Until they've washed all your money and bandwidth away...
They could at least be straight with people and stop screwing customers... This is just another part of the ongoing bandwidth problem propaganda major ISP and Cell carriers alike have been pushing. They're trying to condition us to think bandwidth is getting more costly when in fact it's been getting cheaper and cheaper and will continue to do so.
This is about one thing, and we all know what that is.
stop watching cat videos on Youtube. Just kidding. :p
I understand this is just about priority: once you reach a threshold, your traffic has lower priority than others. It seems a reasonable way of implementing unlimited plan on finite network capacity.
File a complaint for fraudulent/deceptive advertising here: http://www.fcc.gov/complaints
T-mobile does the same thing; I had an "unlimited" data plan and was throttled to below two kilobytes per second regardless of destination/source IP (far below even GPRS speeds) after just four hours of 275kB/sec SSH/SFTP traffic. They sell a plan as "unlimited" because it brings in customers, knowing full well that they intend to place limits on the connection. We apparently live in a world where "first 5GB at up to 4G speeds" means "use it for more than four hours and we'll make it unusable for the rest of the month".
Don't worry, you're not in the top 5%, so it won't affect you! You should probably hate those guys anyway. Stupid 5 percenters! They probably kick puppies!
Throttling based on 'the top X users' will ALWAYS be unjust. Just like there will always be a 'poorest 20%' even if every man, woman, and child is making $1 million per year.
Look, if you want to provide an Unlimited Plan. Offer an Unlimited Plan. Or don't. Do NOT advertise and charge for one thing and supply another.
I could have sworn that part of the deal Verizon negotiated when buying the 700Mhz spectrum was that they would not be allowed to interfere with LTE data transfers of unlimited customers when connected via 700Mhz LTE. What happened to that?
I can't wait to be done with Verizon. If a corporation could be diagnosed as insane, Verizon would be locked up. They're flaunting their new XLTE service, bragging about how fast you can move data then smacking down the small percentage of customers who are in a position to make use of that speed. I recently was in an area where I got 80/44 Mb/s but what good does that do anyone who has a data cap? That's psychotic to keep ramping up the speed and lowering caps.
I'm doing a bit of international travel this month and, when I tried to turn on global data, I couldn't do it thru he website unless I picked a "valid" domestic data plan and a "valid" domestic text plan. I had to contact customer service to get global data turned on and I'm sure I'll have to contact them again to turn it off. When I get back, I'm going to be resuming a long stretch of domestic travel and hotel/resort WiFi universally sucks sweaty donkey balls. I've been travelling around the US for nearly a year and I've stayed in less than half a dozen places that had usable internet. Most places have been less than half a meg down and even slower the other way. Barely able to load a frickin' web page. I've had several months during this trip where I've moved well over a hundred gigs thru my phone via tethering and I don't feel a bit bad about it. I've been paying them around $125/month for nearly 5 years and, for the first two years, I moved less than 10 gigs a month. For the second two years, I hung onto my unlimited plan in anticipation of needing it for this trip and moved less than a hundred megs during many of those billing cycles. Put up with the shittiest service in the area to keep that plan. Had to go outside to make and answer calls.
It was worth every penny of those 2 years to have the plan when I needed it but Verizon's sure not keeping my loyalty with this kind of crap. I was considering keeping it as a backup, continuing to pay $125/month as "internet insurance" once I stop travelling and settle down but I guess there's no point. I guess I'll just switch to whoever has decent local coverage at the lowest price.
http://www.cnet.com/news/why-you-cant-sue-your-wireless-carrier-in-a-class-action/
When AT&T slowed down Matt Spaccarelli's unlimited data plan on his iPhone, the unemployed truck driver from Simi Valley, Calif. took the country's largest phone company to court. And as a surprise to all, he won.
Declan McCullagh/CNET
But Spaccarelli's victory rings hollow. In fact, the route he was forced to take -- suing AT&T by himself as opposed to employing a more influential and wider ranging class-action lawsuit -- illustrates just how difficult it is to change a carrier's business practice through legal means. Rather than big changes and a return of his unlimited high-speed access, he ended up with $850 and a lot of disappointment.
Spaccarelli sued AT&T because, as he argued, AT&T had stopped offering him an unlimited data service . Instead, he said the company was slowing down his service when he used 1.5 GB to 2GB of data in a given month. Spaccarelli's service was "throttled" as a result of a new AT&T policy designed to curb heavy data usage by its unlimited subscribers.
But thanks to a Supreme Court decision in 2011, which upheld a company's right to include a clause in contracts prohibiting subscribers from suing the company as part of a class action, Spaccarelli had only two options when fighting AT&T's new policy: He could enter into an AT&T-funded arbitration program or file his suit in small claims court. Spaccarelli opted for small claims court.
What this meant for AT&T was that instead of facing a multimillion dollar lawsuit, which represented thousands of disgruntled subscribers, the company only had to deal with a single subscriber and damages of $850. Even though AT&T lost its case and paid Spaccarelli the court-awarded damages, the company was not forced to change its throttling policy. And in fact, it still slows down service on what it considers its heaviest data customers, even though AT&T still calls the plan "unlimited."
So yeah... Verizon and other goons have customers by the balls.
be forced to share?
We can hire politicians to loot others' paychecks, but bandwidth is sacred?
How does one go about adding towers with the "NIMBY" mentality in parts of the USA?
> Find the towers that sometimes saturate and then ...
Too late. TFA is about what happens while the tower is saturated, how they divide the available bandwidth between the customers WHEN IT'S SATURATED. Once that has already occurred, it's too late to go back and do analysis and not do what they are doing. They do in fact add towers as you suggest, but this story is about what happens when the tower first becomes overloaded. The overload has to be handled somehow immediately, while it's occurring.
Your gigabit network is nice and all, but this conversation is about phones.
Your entire post is basically repeating the same failure of logic over and over.
They don't put up a new tower for one customer, true. However, 1,000 customers like you mean that 10 more towers hit capacity and ten more need to be added. Verizon isn't making decisions one customer at a time. If they lost a many of their 150 GB / month customers, they could provide better service for a lot more 15GB / month customers and make a lot more money. That would be a good thing for them.
Here's what you're missing. The article is about what happens when a tower hits maximum capacity for a moment.
Suppose the hardware on the tower is capable of serving 1,000 people per second*. There are 1,050 people who want to download this second. Sorry, 50 people are going to have to wait one second. The tower can only handle 1,000. That's just a fact. They aren't "messing with" anything, that's just what the hardware is capable of.
What Verizon has decided is that when there is an overload and somebody will have to wait a second, it'll be the heaviest users who have to wait. After all, they've already used "more than their fair share".
* it's actually how many packets and bytes the tower can serve per second / millisecond, not customer count. The person who uses a lot will wait milliseconds.
It sounds like they're only doing this when the network is congested in a specific location. Like they're basically prioritizing slowing down the heavy users when things get busy, rather than everyone. I have a much harder time getting worked up about that, especially when they're waiting until people are out of contract and can easily switch carriers.
So funny that 4-5GB is considered high usage.
Here In Singapore i chew 15GB a month on average over LTE, hell i stream 1080p movies from my home gig-e connection over Plex.
My plan is 10gb, but with a value add 5gb. With a few discounts and promo offers I pay around $100 USD a month including my calls.
How come America's data rates are so crap, and the limits so small? I always thought USA had high quality internet, you guys are way way way behind the rest of the world.
Then again if you want to see real high speed mobile internet, go live in Korea, they knock even Singapore out of the water.
I've had a VzW unlimited plan for years and was running it thru a proxy. When I downloaded 80G last month ("but it's just a tiny little wafer thin mint"), the proxy link magically won't resolve anymore. But it will on other links, of course.
So this month I plan to download *all* of my stored music from Amazon and Audible.
I was also going to grab the latest Fedora/Debian ISOs from my landline, but now I'll think I'll download more of them via unencrypted and unproxied torrents direct on the phone. This way can see _exactly_ what I'm doing. (Not that it matters, of course.)
It's a bit more of a hassle than downloading straight to the computer, but it's worth it. They *can't* turn off the spigot on the far end, they'll have to do it on my end. Besides, it'll give my old friends at VzW some work so maybe they can keep THEIR jobs longer.
Really though, I don't blame them. If a towers overloaded, throttle/delay the heavy users and give someone else a chance *FOR THE DURATION OF THE OVERLOAD*. The problem comes when EVERY tower becomes overloaded.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
It does not matter how high and how unreachable you set your throttling. If there is a throttling it is not an unlimited data plan but a data plan with a CAP.
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visit randi.org
Verizon and other providers like to pretend that such users are somehow abusing the system or otherwise getting more than their "fair share". Is that really the case? What is 4.7Gbytes of data monthly? It's about 100 kbytes a minute or about 1600 bytes per sec continuously. That's much slower than age old modem technology was capable of, not at all an excessive amount of data. Compare that rate with the data rates Verizon advertises for its 4G LTE plans, in excess of 2Mbyte/sec. So on an average basis they deliver less than 1/1000th of their advertised bandwidth on a continuous basis and Verizon wants to throttle. Or, to put it another way, they advertise speeds of 2Mbytes/sec but if you actually use that speed you'll be capped after 39 minutes. Being able to use up your entire monthly cap in 39 minutes is absurd, even if Verizon is clearly noting the cap in its contracts and advertising. Imagine what would happen if operators had to advertise allowed usage per sec instead of instantaneous data rates. Verizon gets to advertise blazing fast 4G LTE service under Plan A that gives you 16 kbps. Now that would be truth in advertising and give providers an incentive to both raise caps and increase capacity.
The Holocaust didn't affect a considerable majority of Europeans either.
In the long run, yes decreased cost results in decreased prices TO THE EXTENT THAT COMPETITION IS ALLOWED.
If, say Cricket wireless can provide the same service at half the cost, they'll charge less in order to get market share. On the macro level, it puts downward pressure on prices.
Here's a concrete example for you. In the web hosting business, like many others, 20% of the customers result in 80% of the cost. Most customers never require much attention, the servers just run, the bill goes out, and their credit card is charged. A few customers run opt-in mailing lists, and while those are legitimate, they cause some spam complaints that needed to be handled, they need DKIM set up, etc. Other customers feel they need to install a new script every week, so they need a lot of support, and since they do everything ad-hoc rather than settling into a pattern they miss paying their bull sometimes and you have to call them a couple of times to get them to pay. Many years ago, I started a very small invitation-only web hosting service. We only hostprofessional webmasters who know what they are doing, so they don't bug support with stupid questions. Their invoice is billed to their business credit card every month. I have customers I haven't heard from in years. Because of this, our costs are low, and so are our prices. We can provide excellent service at an excellent price because we're not spending our time and money dealing with spam and DMCA complaints, or chasing down past-due accounts. Our costs are low, therefore our prices are low.
* no, we won't host your site. Not unless we know you, or people we know vouch for you. We don't want new customers unless we know those new customers won't bring DMCA, spam, billing, or support problems.
> We don't let car manufacturers advertise MPG
I understand the sentiment. Phone companies sometimes act like jerks. In this case, they are lying by using the word "unlimited". Data transfer is ALWAYS limited,on any media.
Mbps is a measure of speed, though. Technically, looking at how very large networks work, "up to 30 Mbps" is more like saying a Porsche can go "up to 150 MPH".
It's important information for consumers, too. I want to know how quickly my cat video will load - will I have to wait while it buffers? That's actually a completely separate measurement from how many cat videos I can download in a month. Unless of course you assume I'm downloading videos 24/7. I buy bandwidth that way - 24 / 7 dedicated bandwidth. It's VERY A expensive that way because you're not sharing the cost since you're not sharing the bandwidth.
This stems from pricing plans that are designed to brain wash consumer into thinking they are getting great deals because of words like `unlimited' and `free'. In reality, cell service is overpriced and the consumer has little power because of limited competition offering they same kind of plans. Pay for one uses. Works for electricity, works for water. Power companies don't have family plans or double you bill with you go one watt over your limit.
I have an analogy, which please provide your feedback on how I see this, it may help me not be so upset with Verizon. Suppose you rent a car from AVIS and pay $40 / day for unlimited mileage. You get on the road and find out that the car is stuck in first gear, set by AVIS. Just to make the numbers round, lets say then your top speed is 20 mph. The average person renting a car probably wont drive more than 5 hours in a day, so your max distance is 100 miles. Wouldn't it seem contradictory to say you get unlimited mileage when it fact your are limited to 100 miles a day? The overall mileage you can achieve is a formula: Distance = Rate * Time. If you limit the rate, then you limit the distance. I dont see how this analogy isnt applicable to data usage. You cant say data is "unlimited" if you limit one of the two key variables; Data Usage = Bandwidth date * time. I currently get about 45 Mbs on my 4G LTE. If i were limited to a rate of 4.5 Mbs, you essentially capped my data by throttle making the overall data usage limited. Overall, i dont believe something can be unlimited unless the variables which define it are also unlimited.
> Your notion of fairness is like someone standing in line at McDonalds being asked to move to the back of the line because they already bought a dozen hamburgers last week and McDonalds is really busy right now.
FYI, I'm not Verizon. I didn't make this policy. I only explained it.
Interestingly, sit-down restaurants actually DO de-prioritize regulars when they get too busy. Customers who are not regulars (yet) get priority.
> Please, drop the notion of "fair" and "heavy user".
Considering that this story is about the company giving lower priority to heavy users in order to be fair to customers who don't demand as much, it would be pretty tough to have any meaningful discussion about it without discussing the major concepts involved.
Your example assumes (incorrectly) two things which are untrue of the wireless industry, and there is absolutely no sign that it will ever change:
1. In order for your example to apply to the wireless industry, the wireless industry would have to NOT collude on policies and prices between vendors. If you think there is no collusion going on, you only have to look at the changes in policy and price that have happened over the past 5 years between AT&T and Verizon, and between T-Mo and Sprint. One vendor moves; the other quietly follows 3-6 months later so as not to look suspicious. Vendor collusion is real and it's a serious hamper on competition. In general, the moves being made are all anti-consumer, and rather than differentiate as a statement of "hey, we're not evil like them!", the carriers instead opt to reduce their service quality *down* to their competitor's new standard. The bar keeps lowering, not raising. It's the exact polar opposite of the downward pressure you describe.
For instance, compare: AT&T stops unlimited plans; then Verizon stops unlimited plans. AT&T disallows tethering on unlimited; then Verizon disallows tethering on unlimited. AT&T throttles; then Verizon throttles. Even within the limited data landscape, the only thing remotely reasonable that has happened in the last decade is that the price per GB when paid upfront has dropped from about $10 per GB to about $7.5 per GB, on average. That's not a large decrease. And overages have gone UP from $10/GB to $15/GB. Surcharges and other miscellaneous "fees" have also climbed in both number and amount, while the ToSes continue to become more and more hand-wavey about stating exactly what amount of your personal data they are going to keep private, and what they're going to sell to advertisers to make a quick buck.
2. In order for your example to apply to the wireless industry, the wireless industry would have to have actual competition. As it stands, even the carriers that advertise unlimited come with deal-breaking provisos on their plans (such as throttling and tethering restrictions), making them no better than the ones that outwardly advertise limits. The two big carriers -- Verizon and AT&T -- have similar network buildouts and availability; it's just that some areas are better served by one carrier than the other. Prices are similar; the available phones and tablets are similar; tower density is similar; and so on.
The hosting industry has TONS of competition, as I am well aware. In my opinion it is a shining example of a tech industry that has reached that sweet spot where the free, unregulated market truly and honestly works for it, and no regulation is needed, because there are so many different firms offering different competitive advantages that you can browse the internet for a whole week and still not decide on a hosting provider, because there are so many differences between them. Which version of PHP do they run? Do they limit the amount of traffic? Do they cater only to hosting professionals (like your company)? Do they offer rack hosting, cloud hosting, VPSes, dedicated servers, lease-to-own, shared hosting, pay-as-you-go cloud (AWS), cloud-based storage, colocation....? Not to mention there are so many different geographic areas to pick from, and each one has its own smattering of Tier1 ISPs available for the backhaul, all of them offering insanely low prices (I've seen unmetered 100 Mbps on servers priced at $100 - $200 per month now, which was unheard of 5 years ago).
You're basically comparing THE IDEAL technology-related industry that fits like a glove with the unregulated free market approach, to the antithesis of that in the wireless industry.
Imagine if the hosting industry consisted of 95% of people paying $7000/month for a Core 2 Quad in a Softlayer datacenter; and if you didn't go with Softlayer, your other choice would be to pay $7000/month for a Core 2 Quad with slightly different clock speed in a Rackspace datacenter. Imagine if those were your only two choices,
Basically, your post boils down to "Verizon is bad" and "taxpayer subsidies to Verizon are bad".
I agree on both points. I didn't say Verizon is good. I said Verizon isn't scared of losing customers who use their cell phone as a hotspot to provide their home internet servIce and use 150 GB / month or more.
I wouldn't use Verizon or any other contract carrier. Years ago I switched to an off-brand carrier with no contract. The no-contract carrier charged half as much as Verizon or Sprint, while using Sprint towers. So, fuck Verizon and Sprint. I pay $35 / for "unlimited" with LTE, which is a lot less than Sprint charged.
Here's the weird thing - a few years ago, Sprint bought the no-contract carrier that was competing with them, Boost Mobile. Now, it's actually the same company, Sprint, providing the service for $35 under their Boost brand. When I left Sprint years ago, Sprint charged about $70 for a plan with a few hundred MB. Now, the same company sells me unlimited for half the price. That's what we call a price cut of over 50% that was caused by Boost competing with them. There's not enough competition in the industry, obviously. When there is competition, it cuts my bill in half.