Wheeler ‘Deeply Troubled’ by Verizon Decision to Slow Some Customers’ Data Speeds
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler sent Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead a letter Wednesday asking about the carrier’s announcement it would slow some customers’ data speeds on its LTE network starting in October. Wheeler told Mead he was “deeply troubled” by the development. The letter is unusual in that such queries customarily are sent by FCC staff rather than by the chairman himself.
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The Wheeler letter, not yet formally made public by the FCC, cites a report that Verizon plans to “manage” data connection speeds “for a small subset of customers -- the top 5% of data users on unlimited data plans” at times when the network is experiencing high demand.
"'Reasonable network management’ concerns the technical management of your network; it is not a loophole designed to enhance your revenue streams,” Wheeler wrote. “It is disturbing to me that Verizon Wireless would base its ‘network management’ on distinctions among its customers’ data plans, rather than on network architecture or technology.” There is no FCC statement “that would treat as ‘reasonable network management’ a decision to slow traffic to a user who has paid, after all, for ‘unlimited’ service,” Wheeler contended.
Wheeler asks Mead to provide answers to a series of questions, among them, what is the “rationale” for treating customers differently based on their data plan “rather than network architecture or technological factors?” He also asked why the carrier is extending speed reductions from a 3G network to “its much more efficient 4G LTE network?” The letter reminds Verizon of its obligations as a result of the C-block spectrum licenses it bought in the 2008 700 MHz auction that it “may not deny, limit, or restrict the ability of end users to download and utilize applications of their choosing on the C Block networks."
"We will officially respond to the Chairman’s letter once we have received and reviewed it,” a Verizon spokesman said in an email. “However, what we announced last week was a highly targeted and very limited network optimization effort, only targeting cell sites experiencing high demand. The purpose is to ensure there is capacity for everyone in those limited circumstances, and that high users don’t limit capacity for others.”
Free Press “agrees in principle” with Wheeler’s point that “revenue generation techniques should not be cloaked in reasonable network management excuses,” said Policy Director Matt Wood. “It’s good to see the FCC asking questions about the relationship between billing plans and congestion claims.” But Free Press also believes some other practices are more troubling, Wood told us. “ISPs are demanding terminating access charges from edge companies, they're instituting stealth below-the-line fees that take money out of consumers’ wallets, and they're playing around with data caps and data cap exemptions on a number of different fronts."
TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said Wheeler’s letter indicates the FCC will take a much stricter approach on such issues, including for wireless, which faced lighter regulation under the 2010 net neutrality rules. “That seems like exactly the kind of pro-consumer conduct that would have been ‘reasonable network management,'” under the old rules, he said. “Wheeler’s claim that network management is legitimate only when it turns on ‘network architecture’ is deliberately disingenuous: he is actually re-writing the definition of ‘legitimate network management’ to mean only purely technical matters of ‘network architecture and technology,’ instead of how the network is, well, managed. If minimizing congestion isn’t ‘legitimate network management,’ then what is?”