Texas Lawmaker Wants To Ban Mobile Throttling In Disaster Areas (arstechnica.com) 106
Bobby Guerra, a Democratic member of the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives, filed a bill last week that would prohibit wireless carriers from throttling mobile internet service in disaster areas. "A mobile Internet service provider may not impair or degrade lawful mobile Internet service access in an area subject to a declared state of disaster," the bill says. If passed, it would take effect on September 1, 2019. Ars Technica reports: The bill, reported by NPR affiliate KUT, appears to be a response to Verizon's throttling of an "unlimited" data plan used by Santa Clara County firefighters during a wildfire response in California last year. But Guerra's bill would prohibit throttling in disaster areas of any customer, not just public safety officials. Wireless carriers often sell plans with a set amount of high-speed data and then throttle speeds after a customer has passed the high-speed data limit. Even with so-called "unlimited" plans, carriers reserve the right to throttle speeds once customers use a certain amount of data each month.
Despite the Verizon/Santa Clara incident, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has taken no action to prevent further incidents of throttling during emergencies. Pai's repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules allows throttling as long as the carrier discloses it, and the commission is trying to prevent states from imposing their own net neutrality rules.
Despite the Verizon/Santa Clara incident, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has taken no action to prevent further incidents of throttling during emergencies. Pai's repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules allows throttling as long as the carrier discloses it, and the commission is trying to prevent states from imposing their own net neutrality rules.
Livestream (Score:5, Insightful)
Good idea. Then all the yahoos live-streaming the disaster can flood the towers with nonsense traffic.
Maybe have government plans that get priority over the general public?
Re:Livestream (Score:5, Insightful)
Insightful, but no mod points, so you get this instead.
Typical State politician grandstanding on a topic he knows little about, but perceives it to be a hot button topic that might translate to political R & R... recognition and reelection.
Re:Livestream (Score:5, Informative)
How much extra is it going to cause the greedy carriers to remove the caps for a couple of days?
The monetary cost is not the issue. Congestion is. A disaster area is the place where caps are most justified. When disasters strike, there is often a surge of network traffic, beyond the normal level the infrastructure is designed to handle. The caps are needed to keep bandwidth available for emergency personnel.
Re:Livestream (Score:4)
Congestion is. A disaster area is the place where caps are most justified.
No.... Nothing in the text of the bill [texas.gov] really indicates carriers cannot manage congestion in fact the only restriction it gives is "service provider may not impair or degrade lawful mobile Internet service access in an area subject to a declared state of disaster" ----- So they can still manage their network, in fact they could still throttle to slightly lower top speeds which are not slow enough to constitute impairment. Failing to manage congestion in its own right can be considered impairing access through neglect. The issue is throttling after a certain monthly quota --- they can still utilize means of prioritizing the traffic of emergency services and those with lower total usage.
The throttling the carriers normally due is based on arbitrary monthly caps in the total amount of data used --- access is greatly impaired (throttled to a ridiculously slow speed) after reaching a monthly quota that has nothing to do with congestion or network management, because nothing stops 10000 people who have not used up their data allowance from coming on simultaneously and maxing out the local tower capacity.
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Throttling IS degradation of service, BY DEFINITION. This bill can be read as prohibiting throttling to ensure enough bandwidth for emergency workers, though it would not prohibit throttling users who reached their caps. It's poorly written, even if not poorly conceived.
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Throttling IS degradation of service, BY DEFINITION.
Negative. Degradation, by definition is to degrade which means to pass from a higher grade or class to a lower, example: causes the meat to degrade in quality
The service provider has business choices about what levels of service they offer, And if they throttle all users to data-rates which are still within the same grade or class, for example if they throttle every subscriber to a bitrate that subscriber has purchased, then by defintion:
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I highly doubt that when there are a lot of people do live stream all at once, the speed you are talking about is actually workable. I would expect that there will be a lot of lagging/buffering when there are thousands of people do the live stream in the same area. Also, remember that it is "mobile Internet" not a wire internet. Thus, it is also involve cell tower network, not only on wire. You are too optimistic in this case.
Furthermore, the bill is vague. What does it mean by "impair" in the bill? Where i
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Well, they have plenty of time to correct the vagueness -- the bill has only just been filed by author, and still would have to be reviewed by committee.
Also... there is the matter of what "Internet" is --- Internet is a global thing, and much of the carriers' edge infrastructure actually providing the access is likely located in other states besides Texas.
The state of Texas has no legal authority to regulate or affect how a carrier manages their infrastructure located in other states:
the internet
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Maybe force the carriers to actually have enough infrastructure to support the services they collect money for. We can call it "truth in advertising".
Re:Livestream (Score:4, Insightful)
The infrastructure is fine. But wireless spectrum is limited and the link can still be saturated. It should have never been advertised as something capable of unlimited.
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You can improve the bandwidth a lot by deploying more smaller cells.
But yes, they shouldn't be allowed to offer unlimited unless they are prepared to deliver it.
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That whole methodology of deploying more smaller cells (along with a few other improvements) is being termed 5G. There are a lot of towers right now as it is, though.
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I hope those 5G sites are fireproof, hurricane-proof, flood-proof, etc.
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Yes, big fat surprise, infrastructure costs money. That's why consumers are willing to pay for the service the infrastructure provides.
The thing with wireless is that they're not ready to provide unlimited 99.99% of the time. They are quite explicit that they will provide you "unlimited" bandwidth, but after the first 2GB or so they'll LIMIT you to dial up modem speeds.
Of course, before that they just claimed unlimited and silently limited you anyway.
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Wouldn't it quadruple? Depends on whether you're talking about square miles or radius. If it's radius, then you have to double across two axes (like doubling horizontal and vertical screen resolution is quadruple the pixels).
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Infrastructure may NOT be fine, actually, it is a disaster zone, after all. Half the towers might have been knocked out, but you have a massive call increase for people checking out that their relatives and such are okay.
That's why temporary throttling during a disaster may be necessary to provide minimum service to all.
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We're talking about how the infrastructure is now, not how it might be.
It might mean that temporary prioritization is fine during a disaster. But that's far from throttling an emergency service team who's over their data cap and giving priority to ordinary users who are under their monthly cap. And it's not like Verizon advertises anything that's not "unlimited."
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You might be, but I was looking at the thread topic and proposed law, which were specifically for disaster areas.
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A disaster area isn't known in advance would be the point. And the proposed law says nothing of infrastructure.
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlod... [texas.gov]
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Worse, it doesn't make a provision for emergency services, so it will actually make their service worse because consumers who have exceeded their cap will be a bigger burden.
Re:Livestream (Score:4, Informative)
They can do like in Canada, rather then throttling, charge 25-50 cents a MB.
I'd love to get throttled rather then charged an arm and a leg for going over my cell limit.
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Re:Livestream (Score:4, Insightful)
They should pass a law that all bandwidth must double during an emergency!
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No mod points, but this.
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Horrible and stupid idea
1) How are 'government' plans identified?
2) What if a government-plan device is doing non-essential traffic
3) What about many other groups and private citizens who are doing 'emergency' work, like calling in a heart attack or fire but are not on the government plans?
4) What is to prevent government from downgrading or blocking all non-government plan devices to quell, interfere, or isolate the public or protesters or anybody the government doesn't like?
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Horrible and stupid idea 1) How are 'government' plans identified?
Trivially? It's a flag in the database.
2) What if a government-plan device is doing non-essential traffic
Impossible to determine; therefore assume it is not.
3) What about many other groups and private citizens who are doing 'emergency' work, like calling in a heart attack or fire but are not on the government plans?
What happens to all the people who are trying to deal with known, existing emergency issues when Bob calls Uncle Billy to tell him "he's ok, the disaster hasn't hurt him, and by t
Great plan (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone will use tons of data even though half the towers are offline due to the hurricane (or whatever) and public safety officials will be limited by network congestion.
Better suggestion: leave the network management to the guys who know how to do it.
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"Leaving the network operation to the people who know how to do it" is what led to the current situation. Verizon throttled them *because they could*, completely irrespective of the actual situation and putting lives in danger.
Maybe your libertarian ideals mean it's acceptable to murder people for the sake of a quick buck, but thankfully not everyone thinks like that.
Re: Great plan (Score:1)
Citation? Oh wait, that never happened. Maybe you're thinking of Nazis and fascists and communists and Klansmen?
Libertarians just say, if the government needs a service from a company, it needs to pay for it. So if the government paid for priority service during emergencies and at disaster areas and didn't get it, there needs to be an appropriate consequence for that derelict company. But if the government didn't pay for the quality of service they need, the blame is on the government. Learn the lesson and
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In that case, should there be laws requiring ATMs to not limit withdrawls based on account balances in areas in a disaster zone, or gas stations or supermarkets not allowed to turn away people for lack of payment ability?
Where should this responsibility end?
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They should just pass a law that in the event of a disaster, everyone in the disaster area who wants to gets a free instantaneous teleport to anywhere else in the world. Think of all the lives that would save!
And it makes as much sense as this proposed law....
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That's a moronic argument and you damn well know it.
"Lets compare an effectively unlimited resource with extremely limited resources! Yeah, that totally makes sense!"
It is truly depressing that we're on slashdot, yet apparently not a single person commenting on this story understands that INTERNET IS AN UNLIMITED RESOURCE. The only restriction is the total bandwidth available at a given time, and at no point has Verizon complained that this is an issue.
So a few people immediately jump on, "What is everyon
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It is truly depressing that we're on slashdot, yet apparently not a single person commenting on this story understands that INTERNET IS AN UNLIMITED RESOURCE.
That has got to be the absolute stupidest thing I've seen on /. in a long time. The issue is not "INTERNET" (all caps?), it is wireless connectivity, and anyone who has been at a large public event before wireless providers started putting in COWs (cellular on wheels) knows that wireless is NOT an unlimited resource.
The only restriction is the total bandwidth available at a given time, and at no point has Verizon complained that this is an issue.
Really? It is so well known a problem that providers do bring in COWs when events are pre-planned, and AT&T (as the provider for FirstNet) has plans in place to drop COWs and even airborne
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It's only stupid if you ignore inconvenient things like 'reality'.
We arn't talking about public events where there is a ridiculous number of people concentrated in a tiny area that would completely overload a tower. We're talking about wide-scale disasters like forest fires where the current population is running for their lives.
Why would Verizon need to talk to me directly? If they were actually having bandwidth issues, don't you think they would have gone to the news with that for their defense? I have
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We're talking about wide-scale disasters like forest fires where the current population is running for their lives.
And trying to call other people using fewer towers while doing this "running". You don't think it is reality that there will be damage to towers and less service? You don't think it is reality that people who are trying to evacuate are also trying to call other people to arrange transport, find them so they can make sure they get out too, and calling people outside the area to let them know what is going on?
Don't know about your planet, but humans on Earth do that kind of stuff, even during a disaster. Es
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blah blah blah hypothetical scenarios that didn't actually happen
Apparently you'd rather play victim instead of understanding the difference between calling ideas stupid and calling people stupid. We're talking about an idea of a law being stupid. I could have called the author stupid but did not. He's probably not stupid, just ignorant. And his ignorance means he wrote a stupid law. And that law happens to be the subject of this discussion, not some specific action by Verizon in the past. We're looking at a bigger picture here. Can you keep up?
I dunno, can you stop being a "I must win the argument at all costs even if I have to make stuff up" asshole long enough to actually read your own writing? How exactly am I playing the victim? Actually, you know what, I don't know what you're talking about nor do I care. You're clearly too busy inventing hypothetical scenarios to look at the actual events that led up to why this law was being introduced.
The "big picture" is that he introduced a law *in direct response to something Verizon did*.
The Problem with preventing any throttling (Score:3)
I would tend to support prohibitions on throttling for any emergency service and recovery personnel but it seems counterproductive to prevent throttling of typical consumers. During an emergency is exactly the best time to triage and prioritize some communications over others. Given that networks, wireless ones in particular, have limited total capacity I would not want to see emergency service and recovery service traffic taking a backseat to someone in the area watching YouTube videos. It seems emergencies are exactly the sort of thing QoS is designed for! It just needs to be applied properly giving the bandwidth resources to the people who will help the most other people.
Re: The Problem with preventing any throttling (Score:1)
I bet this guy mumbled surrounded by idiots Just before he proposed the bill.
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>"I would tend to support prohibitions on throttling for any emergency service and recovery personnel"
I wouldn't. Not if they bought a plan that does throttling. I fail to understand the public outrage that an agency bought a plan of X GB and then throttling and then got upset about it. If that is not an appropriate plan for emergency service workers, then it should not be what they purchased.
It would be like entering a fire truck rental agreement that could go 100 miles a week and would would not sta
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Too many civilians are acting as first responders for this to be a good idea. Better idea would be to require everyone to maintain a telephone line to be used during emergencies.
We pay taxes to support just that
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I don't mean priority on their personal service, I mean that what you would want to prioritize is their agency/organization owned service devices (i.e. the data connections in firetrucks, etc.)
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(i.e. the data connections in firetrucks, etc.)
A lot of the "data connections" for fire responders are personally-owned devices, since a lot of the response (outside urban areas) is by volunteer firemen.
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It seems emergencies are exactly the sort of thing FirstNet [firstnet.gov] is designed for!
FTFY.
net neutrality is a political only issue (Score:1)
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You mean like instead of Above Unlimited or Beyond Unlimited, they should get the No, Really Unlimited Unlimited package? Did Verizon even give CA first responders an option that prevented throttling in that case?
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>"Did Verizon even give CA first responders an option that prevented throttling in that case?"
THAT is the real question. It is stupid and silly for the agencies to complain that they bought a plan with X GB then throttling.... and THEN complained about the throttling, done exactly as stated in the contract. THAT WAS THE PLAN THEY BOUGHT. And if the government worker(s) entered into that very, very industry-standard agreement without understanding it, then they are very, very incompetent.
If you can't h
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Now, if none of the suitable carriers have such a plan AND are unwilling to create such a plan for emergency agencies (which seems unlikely), THEN perhaps the FCC should step in.
The price per MB for overage is outrageous (even at Verizon's old .002 CENTS per KB). If you think that taxpayer dollars shouldn't be spent on outrageous plans, then perhaps the FCC should step in.
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The price per MB for overage is outrageous (even at Verizon's old .002 CENTS per KB). If you think that taxpayer dollars shouldn't be spent on outrageous plans, then perhaps the FCC should step in.
0.002 CENTS per KB is on the expensive side, but not outrageous. It only becomes outrageous when there are numpties involved who can't do maths and turn 0.002 CENTS per KB into $2 per MB, because to them thousand times 0.002 cents is two dollars, not two cents.
Seems very shortsighted (Score:2)
I'm all for net neutrality in the general case, but during an emergency we have the unfortunate mix of likely having higher demand and lower supply for traffic. Throttling nonessential traffic seems commonsense so essential traffic will make it through. The alternative might be an effective telco blackout during emergencies.
We're ALWAYS in an emergency. (Score:2)
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
Why throttling? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think law makers need to sit down with telcoms and the two need to work out why and when throttling is appropriate.
Especially in an emergency situation when EVERYONE is trying to use it, greedily, and without throttling, you just end in a situation where no one can use it at all.
So basically, understanding why throttling is taking place, before you start making laws about something you potentially have no f'ing clue about.
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I think law makers need to sit down with telcoms and the two need to work out why and when throttling is appropriate.
They already have, at the national level. This is not a state-level regulatory function AT ALL. Not only is the proposed Texas law stupid on its face, it is trying to regulate a national process.
he should (Score:2)
also forbid traffic congestion
Very badly thought through (Score:4, Insightful)
So what telcos should do: Offer a plan exclusively to emergency services with the following rules: 1. They pay for their data and call allowance just like everyone else. 2. When they exceed their data allowance, for example due to an emergency, the bill for that is sorted out later, but they are NEVER capped and NEVER throttled and NEVER blocked. Also, they should get priority of networks are congested due to high traffic.
Of course that doesn't give a firefighter the right to watch videos all the time with a 500MB plan. They will not be capped, or slowed down, or blocked, but they will pay the bill.
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This suggestion co-sponsored by the Full Employment For Lawyers political action committee, who are more than willing to help sort it out later in court. Ambiguous Laws Are Our Speciality (tm)
Emergency services !== public networks (Score:2)
Ups and downs of throttling and cell service (Score:2)
The ups: great when you got service.
The downs; if the cell towers didn't blow down from the storm or simply got wiped off the map. Several key towers were toppled or ruined by Harvey when it hit, pretty much killing all service in the Rockport/Fulton/Holiday Beach area for at least 2 full months after. There was only one tower that stayed in service and it was way down the road from town by Aransas Pass. The poor thing was so inundated with traffic, that data was a slow dog, and more than a few calls were
I see (Score:2)
So bandwidth can magically be created out of nothing. Because legislation!
A gig in every pot!