Oh I can agree. Government is the absolute home of incompetence in the US. It’s BEYOND ridiculous and always gets swept under the rug.
As a contractor for a state government organizations, we had an organization for a specific school system go against literally every single recommendation they sought out, and go with the cheapest product possible.
This product ended up with a breakage rate that was predicted, which went FAR over the yearly budget of said customer. This customer blamed us after 3 years, went with another contractor that bid below us (offering lesser service), and is still using that product despite the problem being the product itself.
While we warned that customer, they refused to listen and continued on a self destructive path of incompetence and failure to enforce their own policies. Sooner or later it’s going to blow up in their faces.
I blame my own company for being willing to accept their money and allowing them to dig themselves into this hole. That’s where I disagree with you @Eden. If Verizon knew, they should have refused service saying “this is the wrong product for you, you need blank, we aren’t going to take your money because this could potentially be bad for both of us”.
Companies should not be exempt from blame for harm, because they still took the money and allowed the customer to make a bad decision. They are a willing party to this incident by taking the money. They can and should be blamed for not exercising their right to refuse service for any reason.
They chose to be greedy and allow the customer to choose a service that was not good enough, thus they should also bear some of the blame. Verizon knew from that previous incident just as much as the customer, and thus should have spoken up and refused service if the customer refused to listen.
Edit: I reject the business mentality of “there’s no such thing as a bad customer”. Which I have heard spoken by several people with business degrees.
The article noted that this happened in a previous incident BEFORE NET NEUTRALITY was ended. So this is not a Net Neutrality issue. Just slimy corporate mega-corparations that need to be busted down and laws enforced to ensure real competition.
I lived in the Philippines for a while. There are basically two companies for wireless: Smart or Globe.
They charge on a DAILY basis for most plans (the monthly plans are horrible). There are no unlimited plans. Your paying by the GB. And you can pay just to use Facebook, or Whatsap, etc… Basically the hell into which we are headed in the USA.
I think there are other potential issues with this case though regarding the FD’s use-case: most of the year they likely do just fine with their plan, but when fire season rolls around they need all they can get.
But since plans don’t work that way, it’s either overpay 70% of the year for the 30% it’s needed, or try and deal with the issue when it arises (which may not even be every year, or quite at the same time).
It’s not like FD’s are rolling in it either so budget concerns are always going to be front and center.
@Token any thoughts from this perspective? You’re the one with the most relevant knowledge I think.
@Steinwerks I was just a pion working for a private EMS company with contract to two cities. For large fires a lot of things kick into gear, lots of municipal fire departments will send mutual aid to larger organizations like CalFire to be used for large efforts- they could all be using different coms, providers, solutions etc. Some cities work out solutions to assist with mutual aid, I believe Glendale FD is part of some larger network of other fire departments but I forget what it was called. Santa Monica FD gave up their own dispatch and use LAFDs (not happily haha)- likely nothing to do with ISPs but they need radio extenders/repeaters and probably contract with all sorts of companies to maintain and service the infrastructure. They would all probably have different plans with different ISPs. The article doesn’t mention CalFire but just Santa Clara and not other agencies that were surely there. So that said, I could imagine the city/county didn’t want to look extravagant with overpaying, FDs budgets are big yet they are not usually a revenue generating service like DWP or even police departments. They probably read “unlimited” at face value as well, vs. techies that frequent a forum like this are all too studied up on the fine print that mentions throttling.
I’m not sure where the management POC was with Verizon, maybe a city hall employee? Maybe a Santa Clara Fire Chief (or a few of them)? My undergrad was in this field (makes me remember a skytalk at DEFCON where the speaker joked about having a music major and thanks to Equifax he is getting a different degree). I don’t recall much being mentioned about working on and maintaining contracts with providers, medical supplies etc, I would say in that domain the focus was more on mutual aid (oh makes me remember how departments in the bay area have to carry adapters for their rigs to work with historic hydrants in San Fran).
Its a sucky situation- lessons learned, and of course I’m routing for this to help with net neutrality, but I think Verizon is pretty bullet proof on this one, they will find a very nice way of saying “should have read the fine print”.
The part of the article talking about having to contact the payment center makes me think of Transformers when the Army cats had to call collect to the Pentagon during the desert battle haha.
It’s ok for the fire department to provision less for their day to day bandwidth, as long as they can get extra capacity in cases like these. It’s up to Verizon to figure the cost structure / customer pecking order.
Have to say I’m with Eden on this one. If internet connectivity is critical they should have redundancy and they bought a product and the product was delivered. Whether it’s a good product is a whole different point, in south africa we have zero net neutrality so you always read the fine print!
Did Verizon say “To get access explicitly to these services, such as Fox News, YouTube, and Google, you must pay more per month”? OR, did Verizon say, “You need to upgrade your data plan to circumvent the 3g downgrade”?
THROTTLING is NOT what Net Neutrality is about. These people spinning this into something it’s not are concerned about votes, propaganda, and self-entitled luxuries.
Title should be changed to: Verizon Systems Do What They’re Designed to Do, Lazy, Cheap, Bloated Government Fails (Yet Again) to Plan Ahead
It’s funny that I, as a tax hating individual, am far more biased against revenue generating organizations than I am against organizations that do not generate revenue.
I hate that police departments are used to make money for the local government, I hate that FD’s don’t get enough funding.
The only exception I can think of is schools. I think a LOT of money is wasted there. Personally I would cancel all sports programs and start funding computer literacy programs, engineering programs, welding, etc. I’d demand that my local school government cancel any arts/sports based programs, in favor of STEM programs.
My logic is this: Sports, and the arts, are luxuries. Our society doesn’t need luxuries right now. We need scientists, engineers, doctors, etc. Those things have a FAR larger impact in terms of a net benefit to society, than arts and sports, which are luxuries and only serve as entertainment.
But I’m getting off topic. If anyone wants to discuss that point further, you’re welcome to make a thread and invite me, or a private thread if need be.
Either way, the system is beginning to fail. Corporations are becoming so greedy that they make stupid decisions that hurt people, and government has become so self serving that it is having a net-negative effect on society.
As much as I dislike Verizon (or any major ISPs in the US really so there is no winning there yet), this looks like either it was the incompetence of the fire department or it was a terrible miscommunication between Verizon and firefighters.
I honestly don’t think there is some great conspiracy here so much as it was an unfortunate circumstance from sheer miscommunication. That sounds a little too crazy even for me.
Personally I would cancel all sports programs and start funding computer literacy programs, engineering programs, welding, etc. I’d demand that my local school government cancel any arts/sports based programs, in favor of STEM programs.
I agree with emphasis of STEM programs and pretty much most of the comment really but I don’t agree with getting rid of arts and sports based programs entirely since having those two are very important to have as well. Besides, it’s important for kids to live a little before being adults, although even that seems like a problem as parents are giving kids too much smartphone time. Having healthy and creative members of society is just as important as having intelligent, engineering members of society. That’s a topic for a different time and place though.
The wording of their post screams agenda. Why does everything have to be like that
fyi there was an actual update from Verizon, as expected, its a mix of miscommunication and the wrong plan.
Update: In a statement to Ars three hours after this article was published, Verizon acknowledged that it shouldn’t have continued throttling the fire department’s data service after the department asked Verizon to lift the throttling restrictions.
“Regardless of the plan emergency responders choose, we have a practice to remove data speed restrictions when contacted in emergency situations,” Verizon’s statement said. “We have done that many times, including for emergency personnel responding to these tragic fires. In this situation, we should have lifted the speed restriction when our customer reached out to us. This was a customer support mistake. We are reviewing the situation and will fix any issues going forward.”
Verizon also noted that the fire department purchased a data service plan that is slowed down after a data usage threshold is reached. But Verizon said it “made a mistake” in communicating with the department about the terms of the plan.
“We made a mistake in how we communicated with our customer about the terms of its plan,” Verizon said. “Like all customers, fire departments choose service plans that are best for them. This customer purchased a government contract plan for a high-speed wireless data allotment at a set monthly cost. Under this plan, users get an unlimited amount of data but speeds are reduced when they exceed their allotment until the next billing cycle.”
Verizon also said that the Santa Clara “situation has nothing to do with net neutrality or the current proceeding in court.”
@Eden and the others that agree with him are exactly correct. The fire department is mostly to blame for the situation. They were using a consumer class (maybe a business class, doesn’t really matter which) data plan for an extremely important, high priority use case. Totally, completely, utterly unacceptable.
Was Verizon’s reaction / solution shitty? Absolutely. But that’s what you get with a consumer or even business account. Oh, you are experiencing slowdown? Better get the next better plan, then. Gotta up sell.
And the throttling after the (probably invisible) cap? Of course, that’s shitty, too. It also has nothing to do with the previous incarnation of net neutrality. They’ve been doing that for a very long time. Hopefully it really brings to light the massive hypocrisy and false advertising all the carriers are doing with “unlimited” plans.
Hopefully, if we somehow reinstate some form of net neutrality, we can add in there that carriers can’t futz with data including chopping speeds down to pre-dial-up speeds. Force them to stop over-selling their network. If you can’t support everyone at the speed you advertise, don’t advertise it. Either be honest, or build out the network to support the load. Pretty simple.
So, basically, TLDR, at the end of the day, the fire department dun goofed trying to save a buck, and Verizon was just being Verizon.
That plan screams of them milking the government for all it can.
Kind of like how some schools can only purchase supplies from specific sources, and those supplies happen to cost up to 4x as much as elsewhere. But the school can’t buy from anywhere else because “reasons”.
Um… they just flat out said “government plan”. As in Verizon already has a plan designed or intended for use by government departments
If it’s anything like the plan that VA ABC has, it’s designed to milk them for every cent they can. Whatever they used this month, is what they pay for, for the next month.
Personally, I’m 100% against datacaps if that isn’t clear. We already pay these ISP’s to upgrade their infrastructure via tax subsidies, and as far as I can tell they haven’t, or are doing so at a painfully slow pace, so they can milk everyone for cash for an imaginary “cost” as a result of one customer using more data than another.
Edit: Now that I think about it, I’m wrong. Milking the gov for what its worth would charging them overage fees whilst not throttling them. Either way, stupid choice by fire department, but datacaps are still complete bullshit and should not be legal.
Um, Verizon themselves said it was a government contract plan. Why is everyone else saying they purchased a consumer plan?
Did anyone actually READ the articles?
Both are to blame here. Verizon, and the Fire department. But once the fire department asked for assistance from Verizon, they should have lifted the restriction and then offered a different plan that would not limit them further, or make a plan specifically for emergency services.
Because I don’t care who you are, I think emergency services should have plans that differ GREATLY than consumer plans. And that means no matter what, the emergency services should NEVER BE THROTTLED during an emergency…
