What's "reasonably necessary"? I think, if they can't handle the traffic demands in an area, they should increase capacity, not actively restrict customers who are paying for a service. Put in more sites serving smaller areas to spread the load. Verizon isn't talking about slowing people down for a few minutes. They're talking about slowing people down indefinitely because of "high traffic". Tho they sure as heck aren't going to define what constitutes throttle-worthy traffic on a specific site. It'll be whatever they decide it is. And "protection of the licensee's network" can mean anything. "All those bits he's moving through our tower are wearing it out. We had to protect ourselves."
I don't believe a single word Verizon has published with regard to this action. They claim 22% of their customers still have unlimited data plans. B. S. Verizon switched to metered plans in 2010. I find it incredibly difficult to believe they have that kind of customer retention in such a churny market. And I'm pretty sure it's been a couple years that unlimited data customers have been required to pay full MSRP for new devices. We're supposed to believe that 22% of their customers have stayed around this long and paid hundreds of dollars for their last device in order to retain their unlimited data plans? And the average use is under 5 gigs per month? That claim doesn't ring true if the 22% claim is true. If all those people are moving such a small amount of data, they wouldn't pay hundreds of dollars for a new phone to keep a data plan they're not using. If there are really that many people paying so much money to move so little data without subsidizing their equipment, Verizon should be ecstatic. None of it adds up.
I think the reality is that they have a very small number of unlimited customers who are moving a ton of data and the chuckleheads at the top have got it stuck in their brains that they're losing money because they're not getting $350 (or whatever the current rate is) for every 50 gigs of data. I'm paying around $125/month and moving 200-300 gigs a month. That seems like a lot of data but I'm paying triple the rate of a wired connection. And I'm rarely in a location for more than a week so my traffic is spread across towers all over the country so I'm not constantly slamming the same site. If it's really costing Verizon more than $1500 to deliver 3tb of data to me over the course of a year, they're getting ripped off.
Also, if Verizon was a person, they'd be diagnosed as psychotic. They're currently advertising XLTE. But what good is all that speed to someone who can only move 2 gigs a month? I was recently in Atlanta and got this from a speed test:
(I know it says <50 miles from Birmingham. The GPS doesn't always report an accurate location when I've just moved a long distance. I was in Birmingham that morning and it apparently hadn't caught on to the fact that I wasn't there any more.)
That speed's fantastic. But totally useless to Verizon's current customer base. What's the point? One side of the company's cranking out incredible performance while the other side is threatening to smack the few people who have the potential to make use of that performance if they dare to do it. It's lunacy.
