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Texas Lawmaker Wants To Ban Mobile Throttling In Disaster Areas (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the cease-and-desist dept.

Bobby Guerra, a Democratic member of the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives, filed a bill last week that would prohibit wireless carriers from throttling mobile internet service in disaster areas. "A mobile Internet service provider may not impair or degrade lawful mobile Internet service access in an area subject to a declared state of disaster," the bill says. If passed, it would take effect on September 1, 2019. Ars Technica reports: The bill, reported by NPR affiliate KUT, appears to be a response to Verizon's throttling of an "unlimited" data plan used by Santa Clara County firefighters during a wildfire response in California last year. But Guerra's bill would prohibit throttling in disaster areas of any customer, not just public safety officials. Wireless carriers often sell plans with a set amount of high-speed data and then throttle speeds after a customer has passed the high-speed data limit. Even with so-called "unlimited" plans, carriers reserve the right to throttle speeds once customers use a certain amount of data each month.

Despite the Verizon/Santa Clara incident, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has taken no action to prevent further incidents of throttling during emergencies. Pai's repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules allows throttling as long as the carrier discloses it, and the commission is trying to prevent states from imposing their own net neutrality rules.

8 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Livestream by JBMcB · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Good idea. Then all the yahoos live-streaming the disaster can flood the towers with nonsense traffic.

    Maybe have government plans that get priority over the general public?

    --
    My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
    1. Re:Livestream by rmdingler · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Insightful, but no mod points, so you get this instead.

      Typical State politician grandstanding on a topic he knows little about, but perceives it to be a hot button topic that might translate to political R & R... recognition and reelection.

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

    2. Re:Livestream by omnichad · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The infrastructure is fine. But wireless spectrum is limited and the link can still be saturated. It should have never been advertised as something capable of unlimited.

    3. Re:Livestream by WhiplashII · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They should pass a law that all bandwidth must double during an emergency!

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      while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
    4. Re:Livestream by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Excellent point.. It's like the morons who bitch when some shop tries to raise prices on items during a disaster, which has the effect of preventing hoarding.. Then they bitch about the fact that some asshole, who got to the store before them, bought up all the fucking batteries or first-aid kits, or whatever.... Rather than allow the price to be raised to a point where some asshole can't buy ALL of the items, but can only afford one or (insert arbitrary number here), thereby forcing a more even distribution of the items, they'd simply prefer the government to step in and encourage hoarding by artificially keeping prices below market demand.

      Every goddamn time there's a fire out here, the assholes all run to the stores and strip the shelves bare of batteries and bottled water.. Well, some do.. The first few in the door usually wipe out all the stock... Everyone else gets to stand around like an asshole.

      Allow prices to spike during shortages and people will quickly figure out the economic (if nothing else) benefit of stocking up BEFORE the emergency.. Nobody wants to try to start their battery hoard when they're selling for 10x normal price..

  2. Great plan by Kohath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Everyone will use tons of data even though half the towers are offline due to the hurricane (or whatever) and public safety officials will be limited by network congestion.

    Better suggestion: leave the network management to the guys who know how to do it.

  3. Why throttling? by duke_cheetah2003 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think law makers need to sit down with telcoms and the two need to work out why and when throttling is appropriate.

    Especially in an emergency situation when EVERYONE is trying to use it, greedily, and without throttling, you just end in a situation where no one can use it at all.

    So basically, understanding why throttling is taking place, before you start making laws about something you potentially have no f'ing clue about.

  4. Very badly thought through by gnasher719 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Here's the facts: We want emergency services to be able to communicate during an emergency, without restrictions. We want emergency service to pay just like everyone else. We don't want massive infrastructure that the end user pays for, and that is useless 99.9% of the time, except in emergencies.

    So what telcos should do: Offer a plan exclusively to emergency services with the following rules: 1. They pay for their data and call allowance just like everyone else. 2. When they exceed their data allowance, for example due to an emergency, the bill for that is sorted out later, but they are NEVER capped and NEVER throttled and NEVER blocked. Also, they should get priority of networks are congested due to high traffic.

    Of course that doesn't give a firefighter the right to watch videos all the time with a 500MB plan. They will not be capped, or slowed down, or blocked, but they will pay the bill.