The Large Print Giveth and the Small Print Taketh Away
October 4th, 2006
Annys Shin has an interesting piece in the Washington Post blogs today, on Verizon Wireless’ definition of unlimited high-speed wireless Internet access.
A computer consultant who was foolish enough to use this resource to the tune of 166MB/day had his contract permanently terminated and was told that he had “abused and damaged” Verizon’s network. Now, working from the broadband wall math that we did a few months ago and some information available from the Verizon Wireless Web site, here’s what we get:
Verizon’s service claims sustained download speeds of 400-700kbps, with bursts up to 2MB per second. For simplicity’s sake let’s say that conservatively amounts to 768k down. 24/7 usage of this unlimited 768k downstream connection would mean that you’re downloading approximately 8,000MB of data per day (or 230GB of data per month).
So that 166MB/day “abusive” download behavior? That’s using 2% of the theoretical capacity this gentleman was paying for.
To be fair, however, it was this guy’s own fault: he neglected to read the fine print in the service agreement, which notes that “If more than 5G/line/month, we [Verizon] presume use is for non-permitted uses and will terminate service.” Referring again to our wall math, we can restate this clause as: if you are foolish enough to try to use more than 2% of this “unlimited” capacity that we’re selling you, we’re shutting you down because anybody who pulls down a lot of data is nothing but a movie downloading, music sharing, VOIP using bitch.”
Verizon Wireless appears to be taking a page from the music industry’s playbook: presume that your customers are all nogoodnick criminals and treat them accordingly.
I take some small consolation from the fact that this is such transparently deceptive advertising that Verizon might actually be forced to increase the font size on these notes by half a point or so…
