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Verizon Wireless Wades Right Back Into the Net Neutrality Debate With Fios Deal (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Verizon is taking a page out of AT&T's book by zero rating its Fios cable TV service for all Verizon Wireless customers. That means that if you purchase your mobile data plan from Verizon Wireless and your cable TV plan from Fios, you can now use the Fios Mobile app to stream live channels and on-demand shows and not have it count against your monthly data cap. (It should be noted that Verizon Wireless and Fios are separate subsidiaries, but both are owned by Verizon Communications.) This builds on Verizon's previous decision to zero rate its Go90 mobile app for customers of its own wireless service, which net neutrality advocates see as prioritizing its own products to the detriment of those from competitors and upstarts. One notable exception here is for customers with unlimited mobile data plans. Streaming Fios Mobile content will in fact count toward the unlimited plans' 22GB a month cap, after which Verizon will cap speeds. This caveat is not made clear in Verizon's marketing language, and instead is found only in the App Store release notes.
. . . . Verizon has been promising to expand FIOS to my area. For 10 years. And hasn't expanded coverage area ANYWHERE near me for 8 years.
And for some obscure reason, their expansion stopped right at the border of Comcast, Charter, and Time-Warner coverage areas.
Funny, that. . . .but, of course, nothing will ever be proven. . .
A violation of the principle of net neutrality would be either Fios or Verizon nerfing a non-Verizon / non-Fios service. In this case, they are just making it cheaper to consume bandwidth that remains on their backbone. Nerfing Netflix or prioritizing voice packets from another voice provider would be a violation of the net-neutral principles. Which they aren't doing.