It seems Verizon Wireless is preparing its network for the launch of the iPhone 4 on February 10th, as the company puts plans in place to limit data hogs who regularly consume “an extraordinary amount of data.” The carrier aims to ensure that performance for other customers isn’t affected by the 5% of users who are taking advantage of that “unlimited” data allowance and helping themselves to a little too much.
In order to ensure a fairer service for all, Verizon plans to throttle the data throughput speeds of these excessive data lovers, and optimize content for a more efficient delivery, which may “minimally impact the appearance of the file as displayed on your device.”
Verizon’s plans were discovered in a PDF on the company’s website, and first picked up by Boy Genius Report. With regards to data throttling, the document reads:
Verizon Wireless strives to provide customers the best experience when using our network, a shared resource among tens of millions of customers. To help achieve this, if you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand. Our proactive management of the Verizon Wireless network is designed to ensure that the remaining 95% of data customers aren’t negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users.
And with regards to delivering content more efficiently through data optimization:
We are implementing optimization and transcoding technologies in our network to transmit data files in a more efficient manner to allow available network capacity to benefit the greatest number of users. These techniques include caching less data, using less capacity, and sizing the video more appropriately for the device. The optimization process is agnostic to the content itself and to the website that provides it. While we invest much effort to avoid changing text, image, and video files in the compression process and while any change to the file is likely to be indiscernible, the optimization process may minimally impact the appearance of the file as displayed on your device. For a further, more detailed explanation of these techniques, please visit www.verizonwireless/vzwoptimization
Whether this is good or bad news for you will, of course, depend on whether or not you’re in that top 5% of customers who use a large amount of data. If you are, it seems the carrier won’t put a stop to your excessive consumption altogether – you’ll still be able to access just as much as you do now – but your speeds will be reduced to make it a little harder for you.
How do you know whether you’re in that top 5%? Well, without knowing exactly how much data you need to consume to join the group, it’s hard for you to tell. However, a study from July puts Verizon customers using more than 2GB of data in the top 5% of data users. Which, as Gizmodo notes, is very close to AT&T’s data cap.
[News via: Boy Genius Report]
Continue reading:
- Everything New Apple Just Announced (Septembe
- Apple Watch Pre-Order
- Apple Research Kit launches with 5 Apps
- Apple TV now only $69
TAGS: AT&T
