According to Boy Genius Reports, Verizon Wireless may soon be throttling data speeds to high-end users.
The blog spotted a PDF outlining the plan:
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.
The network will be doing this by compressing audio and video (the two biggest sources of large data transfers on mobile networks) to these users. While Big Red says its compression will be “agnostic to the content itself,” it’s not hard to see how this could be used to shape traffic and damage net neutrality.
With iPhone 4 pre-orders underway, Verizon is surely at least a little worried about its network capacity, but I’m not sure this is the right way for the company to be handling it.
