Texas Bill Aims to Stop Companies from "Throttling" Internet Service during Disasters

Megalith

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Texas legislators have proposed new legislation that would make it illegal for telecommunications companies to throttle data in disaster areas, but while HB 1426 seems like a sensible idea in theory, some argue it would make things worse for everyone: without the throttling in place, networks could become dangerously congested. Of course, there’s a counterpoint to that, in that ISPs should be responsible for establishing the proper capacity.

It comes after firefighters in California had their data plans “throttled” by Verizon during wildfires there. “The fact that this is now bubbling up at the state level is a good sign," said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, a group that wants net neutrality reinstated. "But in reality, we need the FCC to actually do its job and ensure that these companies aren’t acting in ways that put the public in danger." That's a sentiment shared by former FCC Commissioner Gigi Sohn, who recently told The Hill the FCC had “abdicated” its public safety role.
 
Verizon has been particularly terrible when it comes to disaster response and services.

in the after math of hurricane Michael i was listening to the radio who was doing disaster coverage news and information distribution, it was 2 am at night and an ambulance driver called in asking for for information on whether a certain route was open, because apparently his OPS was unreachable. apparently a large majority of the first responders down here were on verizon, and since verizon was taking their time restoring services a lot of people were cut off unless they had an at&t phone handy.

to this day the Verizon service in this town has yet to be restored to what it once was.

this combined with forest fire data fiasco, and their sluggish response to restoring service its clear that Verizons focus is not on the availability or quality of their data services.
 
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Honestly anybody that is abdicating any kind of Government responsibilities should be charged as a traitor, Its one thing to understand perhaps when Federal powers overstretch and overreach beyond areas where they should versus doing one's actual Job that a branch was created to process and regulate. Pai is merely a puppet who contradicts his own statements and reality in a wing of the government where they believe Federal powers should be disarmed, and industries deregulated to the point Business's can claim all the benefits without the responsibilities of being an American company or operating in the US, the next 1o years should be a point of revaluation of Gov. and its responsibilities as well as a dispelling of the its illegal if your caught, and even if you are caught its possible to buy restitution and bypass law and fairness perspective.
 
Certain politicians vote to throttle and certain types don't. If you don't want throttling consider that when you vote.
 
As far as i know the concept of throttling don't even exist here, and i don't get why it should exist elsewhere unless its a case of "you cant handle the truth"
 
Isn't this something our benevolent corporate overlords should already be doing. ;)
 
Hmm, didn't a federal organization propose a rule that would have stopped this from even being an issue?
 
Fine them 20 million dollars for every infraction of throttling, per device.

Watch the infrastructure become 10x better than what it needs to be before the year is out.
 
As far as i know the concept of throttling don't even exist here, and i don't get why it should exist elsewhere unless its a case of "you cant handle the truth"

I don't have throttling, they guarantee 150 mbit but I have 500\\500.
my neighbour probably has the same, everyone does and we never ever have an issue and there is a lot of countries that has the same setup, vast distances, mountains, rivers and bad terrain - Check!
Still no issue.

USA has one of the worst end user internet connections, hell even our office buildings with 1000 users has worse internet than i have at home and it's not more than 2 years since we terminated our last T1 connection in USA for a Office!

Internet is an important infrastrucure, Governments should prioritize it as such!
 
IIRC, congestion throttling wasn't really the issue with the Cali firefighters, it was their plan busted the data caps on the service they bought and the system automagically implemented the service degradation mentioned in the TOS at a particularly bad time. Better way for this law to achieve the desired result is mandate a 'First Responder' service tier. That tier gets max bandwidth always and no data caps ever.
 
The government already pays internet companies huge subsidies and provides tax relief so that they maintain and EXPAND, yet they dont do exactly that.
Trusting Them to do anything positive at this point is ludicrous . They ought to threaten to take those payments and breaks away if the provider cant deliver reliable service.
 
*sarcasm* Gov't needs to quit meddling in business with regulations and let the free market decide whats best *sarcasm*
 
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