Thursday, February 3, 2011
Verizon Throttling The Top 5% of Bandwidth Users
Posted by Michael Knutson in "Apple Talk" @ 11:00 PM
"According to a PDF memo available on Verizon Wireless' website (for now), the company will begin to throttle the data-throughput speeds of customers that consume an "extraordinary amount of data" and "seamlessly" optimize content for smartphones."
Interesting that Verizon's capacity management process/restrictions "may" be implemented for data users that are in the top 5% of all customers in terms of usage. There is a large gray area as to what constitutes abuse of the network. If a user takes advantage of some of Verizon's media offerings, and uses a lot of bandwidth in the process, should they be penalized (throttled)? I haven't seen Verizon's contracts, but if a user contracts for "unlimited" use, and isn't doing anything illegal or unethical, should they be penalized? I wonder if this is an issue in countries with much higher bandwidth available, like South Korea or Sweden. Thoughts, readers? Should Verizon be threatening this?
