Verizon Wireless won't make any new friends with this latest move to swat down heavy downloaders
When Verizon Wireless announced that the iPhone 4 would be coming to its network, the company made sure to make everyone know that its network was prepared to handle the onslaught of new devices. After all, Verizon Wireless is home to numerous Android devices which themselves tend to be data hungry.
Today, however, we're getting news that Verizon Wireless has plans to keep its network "in check" to ensure that it doesn't run into the same roadblocks as AT&T. Boy Genius Report noticed that the company has posted a new notice on its site [PDF] that targets heavy downloaders:
Verizon Wireless strives to provide customers the best experience when using our network, a shared resource among tens of millions of customers. To help achieve this, if you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand. Our proactive management of the Verizon Wireless network is designed to ensure that the remaining 95% of data customers aren't negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users.
Unfortunately, there is no indication of what threshold has to be crossed before Verizon Wireless will start throttling your speeds; and there is no indication of how slow your data speeds will be after getting busted by the company.
This new measure is effective starting today.
The data throttling isn't the only change coming to Verizon Wireless. The company also announced that it is incorporating new transcoding technology into its network to help streamline data transfers. You can read more info about this technology here.
Yesterday, AT&T announced that it would be expanding its tethering data allowance from 2GB to 4GB. This was seen as a move to better align the company with Verizon Wireless' data plans for the iPhone 4.
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This is some crap comcast would try and pull.
this is a post from a member on a different site.
I believe it's just what Verizon has in mind to do.
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The problem with only defining it as a percentage of the highest consumers is this:
Feb 3, 2011 - Verizon looks at data usage and limits top 5% of users to 200kbs down for the next 1-2 months.
Feb 10, 2011 - Verizon again looks at data usage and limits top 5% of users (a different top 5% mind you) to 200kbs down for the next 1-2 months.
Feb 17, 2011 - Verizon again looks at data usage and limits top 5% of users (a different top 5% than the first 2 times of course) to 200kbs down for the next 1-2 months.
Feb 24, 2011 - Verizon again looks at data usage and limits top 5% of users (a different top 5% than the first 3 times) to 200kbs down for the next 1-2 months.
Just in these first 4 instances, totaling 3 weeks, Verizon has now blacklisted 20% of their users and stuck them with 200kbs (or whatever arbitrary rate Verizon chooses) for the next 1-2 months. Depending on how often Verizon does this they could have half their users stuck with low download speeds in the time period they have specified.
