FCC Chairman brushes off Verizon's excuse for throttling unlimited LTE plans
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler isn't happy with Verizon's reply to his strongly worded letter, which chastises the company for its plans throttle some unlimited LTE subscribers. See, Big Red defended the move and reasoned that the other major carriers (AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile) do it too, and it's a widely accepted practice to maintain a network's quality. "'All the kids do it' is something that never worked with me when I was growing up," Wheeler said, adding that the excuse didn't even work for his kids. The chairman also revealed that he sent similar letters to the other carriers after the sending the first to Verizon, asking them to explain themselves for adopting the practice. To be clear, Big Red's throttling plans will likely affect just a handful of subscribers (only the top 5 percent users of the carrier's obsolete unlimited LTE data plan). Wheeler, however, is concerned that Verizon's "choosing between different subscribers based on [their] economic relationship with [the company]." The carriers haven't issued their own statements yet, but they'll clearly need a better reason to convince Wheeler that they absolutely need to throttle subscribers' speeds.
