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

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.

Comments

Livestream

[JBMcB]

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?

Re:Livestream

[rmdingler]

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.

Re:Livestream

[omnichad]

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.

Re:Livestream

[dryeo]

They can do like in Canada, rather then throttling, charge 25-50 cents a MB.
I'd love to get throttled rather then charged an arm and a leg for going over my cell limit.

Re:Livestream

[WhiplashII]

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

Re:Livestream

[ShanghaiBill]

How much extra is it going to cause the greedy carriers to remove the caps for a couple of days?

The monetary cost is not the issue. Congestion is. A disaster area is the place where caps are most justified. When disasters strike, there is often a surge of network traffic, beyond the normal level the infrastructure is designed to handle. The caps are needed to keep bandwidth available for emergency personnel.

Re:Livestream

[mysidia]

Congestion is. A disaster area is the place where caps are most justified.

No.... Nothing in the text of the bill really indicates carriers cannot manage congestion in fact the only restriction it gives is "service provider may not impair or degrade lawful mobile Internet service access in an area subject to a declared state of disaster" ----- So they can still manage their network, in fact they could still throttle to slightly lower top speeds which are not slow enough to constitute impairment. Failing to manage congestion in its own right can be considered impairing access through neglect. The issue is throttling after a certain monthly quota --- they can still utilize means of prioritizing the traffic of emergency services and those with lower total usage.

The throttling the carriers normally due is based on arbitrary monthly caps in the total amount of data used --- access is greatly impaired (throttled to a ridiculously slow speed) after reaching a monthly quota that has nothing to do with congestion or network management, because nothing stops 10000 people who have not used up their data allowance from coming on simultaneously and maxing out the local tower capacity.

Great plan

[Kohath]

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.

Why throttling?

[duke_cheetah2003]

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.

Very badly thought through

[gnasher719]

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.