Wildfire Today

When executives from Verizon were summoned to California’s capitol Friday to sit for a tongue lashing by an Assembly Committee, the company announced that just hours before, they had changed their policy about limited vs. “unlimited” data for cell phone accounts used by emergency first responders. They had attracted an enormous amount of criticism after the Verizon account used by a Command and Control vehicle working on the Mendocino Complex of Fires in Northern California was victim to having their data rate reduced to 1/200th of their regular rate.

According to The Verge:

The company says it has since removed all speed cap restrictions for first responders on the West Coast and in Hawaii, with the plan to continue doing so during future disasters. Verizon will also launch a new service plan next week that’ll cater to first responders and will feature unlimited data with no caps on mobile solutions. That plan will include priority access.

The Command and Control vehicle’s primary function is to track, organize, and prioritize routing of resources from around the state and country to the sites where they are most needed. OES 5262 relies heavily on the internet to do near-real-time resource tracking.

The Santa Clara Fire Department that operates OES 5262 had a Verizon plan advertised as having “unlimited data”. However the fine print in the contract allowed Verizon to throttle the Fire Department’s data to a fraction of the regular rate after a limit was reached.

While fighting the fire, one of the captains operating the equipment complained to Verizon that the command and control unit had been so hobbled that “it has no meaningful functionality”. The battle with the fire morphed into a fight with Verizon as fire department personnel fought with the company about restoring their “unlimited” data rate. Eventually after getting various sections in Verizon and the Fire Department involved, the cell phone plan in OES 5262 was upgraded to a more expensive plan that had more capability.

In a perfect world the fire department might have known in advance that their “unlimited data” was a gross deception by Verizon and could have switched to a more expensive plan that perhaps didn’t have such severe throttling issues. Or, Verizon would not have described the plan as unlimited, since it wasn’t.  Or, Verizon could have un-throttled them very quickly after receiving the department’s first complaint and worked out the details later. But none of that happened.

On August 22 in our article about the throttling, we wrote:

The intentionally misleading use of the term “unlimited” by the four cell phone carriers is part of the problem here. The FCC and the Federal Trade Commission should do their job and stop this practice.

The issue has also fired up politicians in Washington. In a letter to the FTC signed August 24 by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and 12 other representatives, they wrote.

…Unfortunately, with its repeal of the 2015 Open Internet Order, the FCC has abdicated its jurisdiction over broadband communications and walked away from protecting consumers, including public safety agencies. We, therefore, call on the FTC to protect consumers from unfair or deceptive acts or practices stemming from this incident.

It is unacceptable for communications providers to deceive their customers, but when the consumer in question is a government entity tasked with fire and emergency services, we can’t afford to wait a moment longer. The FTC must investigate whether Verizon and other communications companies are being unfair or deceptive in the services they’re offering to public safety entities, and if so, to determine what remedies are appropriate to ensure our first responders have adequate service when lives are on the line.