Verizon new policy

[Cory Schuller]

This might be of interest to some of you out there.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/03/technology/verizon_data_cap/index.htm?source=cnn_bin&hpt=Sbin

 

[Tim Shriver]

Lets see, they are bringing you faster and faster speeds, with phones getting faster and with larger capacities and more functions, they add streaming audio/video content, they promote the heck out of said phones, then break your fingers for using those phones.

Nice business plan.

Tim

 

[Skip Talbot]

Does the throttling replace other penalties for going over your 5GB cap? Are there any penalties currently? I'll take getting throttled over shut down completely or billed for excess data. Several years ago when I was in the college dorms we used to have a 500 MB a day limit on the LAN internet and they used to shut your internet down for days if you went over it. Now they simply throttle you down. This is a good thing that cell phone companies are finally implementing this if it means not having to worry about hitting that cap. Wouldn't you rather have a cop slow your car down for the rest of your drive rather than him pulling you over and citing you $150?

 

[cedwards]

Does anybody know if this will affect aircards as well, or just smartphones?

 

[rdale]

It says anyone with a Data Plan...

 

[Matt Tottle]

Does the throttling replace other penalties for going over your 5GB cap? Are there any penalties currently? I'll take getting throttled over shut down completely or billed for excess data. Several years ago when I was in the college dorms we used to have a 500 MB a day limit on the LAN internet and they used to shut your internet down for days if you went over it. Now they simply throttle you down. This is a good thing that cell phone companies are finally implementing this if it means not having to worry about hitting that cap. Wouldn't you rather have a cop slow your car down for the rest of your drive rather than him pulling you over and citing you $150?

Honestly I see this throttling happening in addition to the current 'cap and charge' scheme. They'll still hit you for overage charges if you exceed 5GB/mo, but then they'll throttle you for the following month. You'll still be able to exceed the cap and get charged, but it'll just take you longer to get there.

As for the cop analogy, it doesn't really match up to this, since you can't exceed the maximum speed.. But I would have to know what they would cut you down to before I made that decision. If the cop drops you to 15mph and you have 1,000 miles of highway left to go, I'd pay the $150 in a heartbeat (but again, it's not really a fair analogy since we're talking about "distance", not speed). The reason I used such a drastic slowdown as an example is because I've had my cable modem throttled before, and they knocked me down to 100kbps on a line that was normally 15Mbps. So if they are going to throttle you down to something that's barely useable vs getting full speed and just paying for the overage, it would be more worth it to pay the overage at $10 a gig.

 

[Tarmo Tanilsoo]

How it works here in Estonia, at least on my provider, is that if the cap is reached, the speed is throttled, but no overage charges. Users have though option to resume normal speeds, but then the overage fees kick in.