Although calling out wireless carriers is a frequent pasttime here at BGR, sometimes a story comes along that sounds so cartoonishly villanous that you assume something in the story is wrong.
Although calling out wireless carriers is a frequent pasttime here at BGR, sometimes a story comes along that sounds so cartoonishly villanous that you assume something in the story is wrong. But in this case, there are emails, and what they reveal is that Verizon’s big talk about supporting emergency services apparently doesn’t work in the real world.
Ars Technica ‘s Jon Brodkin found a series of emails between the Santa Clara County Fire Department and Verizon discussing the fire department’s supposedly unlimited plan, how it was being throttled while on scene trying to battle a wildfire, and what could be done about it.
Firefighers use the internet to coordinate the response during fires, and the SCCFD was having problems with the Verizon service on one vehicle, OES 5262. The fire department thought that they had a completely unlimited plan with no throttling, so when the speeds were slowed all the way down, they reached out to Verizon to see what was up. From the fire captain to Verizon:
The response they got was…to upgrade the plan:
The response from one of the fire department’s senior officers has some elements that feel oddly familiar from personal experiences with telecoms customer support — I thought we’d resolved this before:
So at this point, Verizon has had it spelled out to them that this is critical emergency response equipment involved in saving people’s lives, the customer support people work out that they should probably stop wasting the time of firefighters during some of the worst fires in state history, and fixed the problem, right? Nope:
In other words: Unlimited isn’t unlimited, and it’s all in our terms and conditions, so really, not our fault! It’s also worth mentioning that nowhere here does anyone at Verizon propose fixing the problem temporarily while all this haggling is going on which, as you’d expect, annoys the fire captain on the ground, who chimes back into the email thread:
After two more pleading emails from the fire department IT department — one of which just says “Please work with us. All we need is a plan that does not offer throttling or caps of any kind.” — Verizon replies with an option for a $99 plan that has 20GB of built-in data, with an $8 per GB charge after that. Ultimately, a full month after the issue was initially raised, that’s what the department ended up doing.
In a statement to BGR, Verizon defended its plans, but said that not lifting the throttling restriction (for a month!) was just a mistake:
One of the big problems in all this is that Verizon makes a big public deal about its support for emergency services, but this isn’t the first time that it’s been caught out for saying one thing and doing another. In February, the company ran an advert about first responders during the Super Bowl, but the very first town featured in the ad is a total Verizon black spot. The ad appears to have since been pulled from YouTube.
What’s worse is that this entire situation would never have come to light were it not for a brief filed by 22 state attorneys general as part of a lawsuit, which seeks to overturn the repeal of net neutrality rules by the FCC.
But hey, at least those firefighters have six months of free Apple Music, even if they don’t get unlimited data.
