14 DAY TRIAL // A few days ago, FCC boss Tom Wheeler wrote a letter to Verizon’s CEO asking for explanations over the company’s plans to throttle Internet speeds for the heaviest data users during peak periods. Now, Verizon’s chief says that everyone does the same thing.
As if this were a good enough reason for Verizon to make this move, Chief Executive Officer Daniel Mead said that all of its competitors were doing the same thing and went as far as to share links to the network management plans of AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint.
“I don’t think the FCC really understood what we were doing,” Mead defended his company's decision, saying that the policy would only affect the speeds of a tiny minority of users connected to a cellular tower during times when demand is high.
Under the new policy Verizon wants to enforce, 4G LTE customers on unlimited data plans will experience lower speeds if they are on particular cell sites that are in high demand. Basically, those unlimited data plans aren’t so “unlimited” because Verizon wants to throttle people’s speeds to open up bandwidth instead of working on expanding its network capacity.
“Your website explains that this was an extension of your ‘Network Optimization’ policy, which, according to your website, applies only to customers with unlimited data plans. Specifically, Verizon Wireless ‘manage[s] data connection speeds for a small subset of customers – the top 5% of data users on unlimited data plans’ in places and at times when the network is experiencing high demand,” the FCC chief wrote to Verizon last week.
He then goes on to classify the changes as “disturbing,” because it considers that Verizon is basing its network management on distinctions among its customers’ data plans, rather than on network architecture and technology.
This is, of course, against net neutrality rules, which Verizon doesn’t really care much about. After all, it was this particular telco’s lawsuit that caused the entire scandal surrounding the net neutrality topic and led to the FCC being unable to impose open Internet rules on all telcos.
Verizon further tried to justify its changes by saying that it applied similar network management plans to customers on its 3G network for the past three years, so it wouldn’t really be a big change to extend this to 4G LTE customers too.
The FCC still needs to come up with a proper plan to handle net neutrality rules, because the proposed rules that hundreds of thousands of people, as well as companies in Silicon Valley and beyond, have protested against would allow telcos to sign peering deals for an inexistent “fast lane” for companies with deep enough pockets.
The alternative that everyone is asking the FCC to adopt is to reclassify telcos as common carriers and gain power over them.