"Verizon Wireless' throttling of a fire department that uses its data services has been submitted as evidence in a lawsuit that seeks to reinstate federal net neutrality rules. 'County Fire has experienced throttling by its ISP, Verizon,' Santa Clara County Fire Chief Anthony Bowden wrote in a declaration. 'This throttling has had a significant impact on our ability to provide emergency services. Verizon imposed these limitations despite being informed that throttling was actively impeding County Fire's ability to provide crisis-response and essential emergency services.' Bowden's declaration was submitted in an addendum to a brief filed by 22 state attorneys general, the District of Columbia, Santa Clara County, Santa Clara County Central Fire Protection District, and the California Public Utilities Commission. The government agencies are seeking to overturn the recent repeal of net neutrality rules in a lawsuit they filed against the Federal Communications Commission in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit..." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...rtments-unlimited-data-during-calif-wildfire/
Emergency services should have their own network. It can't be expected that these companies will consider your emergency to be more important than their greed.
True. But fact still remains these USA telecoms are milking everything and everyone for all they can. Throttling is been around for some time but seems of late they do extra trimming and bandwidth "adjustments"? more often then before and it won't stop until they get hauled into court and once proven, slap a hefty monetary cut in their bottom limelight. It's understood that they are a business for profit etc. but they also seem to hold a strong monopoly on their assigned frequency distributions so much so they can afford to take risks in scaling back those services with throttling. Mind you, likely where consumers are concerned, there's probably massive amounts of bandwidth going right out the windows on all sorts of nonsense, which in turn drives these techies at telecom to either raise rates or throttle the signals which when engaged you might just as well have telephone booths reinstated again and party lines. Businesses on the other hand like Public Emergency Services really should have (as you say) their own network though. Between the Military-Commercial Air Traffic-and who knows what all else, one wonders just how much airtime is left for the rest of those who are depending on data services like that more than ever before.
I'm well aware of the throttling they do, but I would expect emergency services to be excluded from it. I doubt court will do much, as unfortunately I assume what they are doing is not illegal. I still want to know why ANYTHING military/emergency/government/utility is on the public internet. I do know that this article will stop me from considering going back to Verizon anytime in the near future unless they publicly apologize and never do it again. I'd still rather see private networks for these agencies.
They use the public internet for the same reason they use the public highways. The cost of a private network that would satisfy their needs would be absurd and a waste of resources. Just as you are required to pull aside for emergency response vehicles, legal priority should be given to emergency responder use of the internet. Yes, they can have their own private intranet but it will still need to use an in house VPN and the public internet for remote access. VPN technology was originally intended for this purpose. Companies providing VPN servers for personal privacy came later.
A question to the folks from the US: Are there any good, friendly ISP (no throttling, no filtering, no nonsense)? Because from what I see, it's two or three big ones, and they seem to be sub-average. Mrk
There are some local ones still but they are few. Where I live the one that provides good bandwidth is notoriously unreliable and I go for a slower but reliable provider. Other than that there are the cellular networks with monthly data caps and throttling. For what I pay here, I could have gigabit fiber in a lot of places.
It's strange. In my country in cities I am often being (one big, one small) I can get "up to" around 300 Mbit/s for equivalent of 17 or 19 usd/month. In practice it is around 88% to 95% of advertised bandwidth, but it is quite reliable and fine for me.
I still have trouble with all of that when you consider 40 years ago emergency providers had their own private radio network before the internet was a thing. No concerns about being at the mercy of hackers or ISPs/Telcos.
In times past, at least in the once large city i grew up in-during a serious emergency-large industrial fire-weather event etc any services that required uninterrupted unfettered access to radio or any other communication, even analog TV, all attention was turned to seeing to it emergency response workers had full access to every critical service necessary for them to carry out their duty uninhibited. Nowadays some municipality work forces depend on new data access. As @MisterB spells it out, legal priority must be given to emergency responder's use of the internet when it's mission critical especially. And I don't think it gets any more serious of a priority than when you are dealing with what we all have seen and read about with those raging wildfires in California.
I have Verizon Go Unlimited plan. And they throttle me. They told me that I can upgrade to their "beyond unlimited" for $10.00 a month more and I wouldn't be throttled. I'm already paying way too much as it is.
@Infected, I seriously share your pain. I was a long time long term Verizon customer early on but when they began to throttle me (in my opinion way too early) to the point of data transfer of simple things like sending pics to Flickr or anything else I finally threw in the towel and switched to StraightTalk whereby it wasn't long before they too started the same scaling of data signal some months down the road. Telecoms are such tightwads anymore.
Verizon throttling firefighters may have violated FCC rule, Democrats say Verizon misled firefighters about limits of "unlimited data," senators say. September 7, 2018 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...ers-may-have-violated-fcc-rule-democrats-say/ letter (PDF): https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/1/f/1fba8b2b-da27-4089-9fb9-273c3d057157/769DC57351667F7EE19B1C0CFC120DA2.2018.09.06-telecom-letters.pdf
Ugh. No loyalty to the importance of such services or special provisions for those who's duty it is, maybe to save their own lives or life of a family member and/or friend? Such is the prime greed factor that there's no space for potential life saving/rescue when seconds-minutes really count?
After throttling firefighters, Verizon praises itself for “sav[ing] lives” Verizon tries to repair reputation after throttling firefighters during wildfire October 8, 2018 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...ters-verizon-praises-itself-for-saving-lives/
Texas Bill Aims To Stop Companies From 'Throttling' Internet Service During Disasters February 8, 2019 http://www.kut.org/post/texas-bill-aims-stop-companies-throttling-internet-service-during-disasters
Wireless carriers fight ban on throttling firefighters during emergencies April 25, 2019 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...up-opposes-ban-on-throttling-of-firefighters/
