Screwed Over

In California there is a wildfire epidemic happening as we breathe right at this moment, the same sort of problem we Canadians have to deal with and it doesn't help matters when you have no cell service, which is what the California fire department had to deal with when Verizon decided to throttle down their cell usage while they were fighting fires.

4,500 homes were is danger countless lives of people and animals. The California fire department, have this piece of equipment that needs to use cellular data in order to track weather patterns in real time, but after their system had burned through 25 gb of data their "unlimited" package that they bought from Verizon was throttled down because they went over the "cap".

The Fire department emailed and complained, explaining that without internet speed their system was basically useless and that lives were in danger.  The email they had sent basically said "lift the throttle now". 

Verizon didn't lift throttled service and rather than restoring the fire department to an essential data transfer speed, they indicated that County Fire would have to switch to a new data plan at more than twice the cost and they would only remove throttling after County Fire contact the department that handles billing and switched to the new data plan.

While Their internet was down the fire Department had to rely on other agencies equipment that they were unfamiliar with to help them battle the blaze.

It really makes me sick to think, that in a crisis situation that a company is going to use burning houses and peoples lives as leverage to make a few more bucks.  The really terrible thing about this and the real crime is that there is nothing we can do about it but basically complain.

Verizon has said they have made a mistake, and they are looking into the matter.  County fire has their bandwidth back but not after all the hoops they had to jump through and this story made headlines.

Scott Goerz