California county calls data throttling of firefighters ‘ridiculous,’ Verizon apologizes for ‘process failure’
What is in this article?
- California county calls data throttling of firefighters ‘ridiculous,’ Verizon apologizes for ‘process failure’
- California county calls data throttling of firefighters ‘ridiculous,’ Verizon apologizes for ‘process failure’
- California county calls data throttling of firefighters ‘ridiculous,’ Verizon apologizes for ‘process failure’
California county calls data throttling of firefighters ‘ridiculous,’ Verizon apologizes for ‘process failure’
Williams offered additional perspective on the matter during his interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.
“The FCC, with the repeal of net neutrality, basically said, ‘We’re completely backing away from treating Internet access as an essential service that’s going to have any basic standards,’” Williams said during the interview. “Given the importance of Internet access today, that just makes no sense.”
Williams said that Verizon has not provided Santa Clara County with an explanation why the firefighting unit’s data was throttled.
“They [Verizon representatives] put out their statement, but they haven’t contacted us,” Williams said. “They haven’t contacted the county counsel’s office, that’s for sure, and we’re the ones running the litigation.”
In December, Verizon announced that it had enabled priority-and-preemption capabilities on its network for public-safety customers. When asked about priority and preemption, Verizon said the functionality was not implemented in the Santa Clara case for multiple reasons and that the capability would not have impacted the data throughput experienced by the firefighting unit.
Erwin noted that Verizon began offering prioritized access to the network to public-safety customers’ smartphone devices in April, but that functionality did not apply at the time to in-vehicle routers, such as the one used by OES 5262.
A Verizon spokesperson also noted that priority-and-preemption capabilities only are implemented during times of network congestion, which was not an issue in the Santa Clara County situation. Furthermore, priority and preemption are capabilities used to gain access to the network, but the functionalities do not impact the data-throughput rate experienced after the customer is on the network.