V is for Verizon, void of values

Consistency is a virtue, as the old saying goes. Maybe it is for bowel movements, but it’s a bygone concept for telecom companies. Even their mistakes become opportunities to scam more money from loyal customers. Case in (pain) point: Verizon’s announcement last week that it would impose threshold-based throttling on the top 5 percent of its data users starting in October.

To hear Verizon tell it, the move is all about “optimizing” network performance for everyone. Clearly, that’s what the big, gentle V has always been about: happy customers. That’s like me trying to convince Pammy I meant to sleep in the bathroom last Friday because that fifth of Johnny Walker tasted yummier on the way up than it did on the way down.

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She didn’t buy my story and I’m not buying Verizon’s. Its real list of reasons should run something like this:

1. We want more money.
2. We offered too much LTE service and hype with way too little capacity and now we’re screwed.
3. We want more money.
4. We left customers on an outdated usage model and can’t move them off without using a stick.
5. We want more money.

6. As an industry, we’ve effectively hacked up various metro geographies into monopolies anyway, so let’s see how far we can push it.

   Hmmm, what else? Oh yeah:
7. We want more money.

Except for the point about monopolies, the rest of those reasons are perfectly legit for your average sociopathic corporate mindset. All businesses want more money — you can’t blame them for that even if they’re bloated enough to make Jabba point and snicker.

Verizon has no one to blame but itself

Face it, Verizon: You screwed up and allowed no-limit data plans from as far back as the EVDO era to score huge on 4G. Those users are out of contract anyway, so why make up a transparent lie to justify pushing them to other plans? It’s not like one more PR bath will make a difference. Stop servicing them, let us hate you a little more (which we’ll do in any case), and move on.

I suppose the last one is the real thorn. Verizon went wide with LTE but failed to go deep, and now it’s biting Verizon on its boil-infested derriere. By most reports, Verizon customers get LTE coverage in more U.S. geographies than customers on other carriers, but they suffer from roughly a quarter to a third the transfer speeds — probably why Verizon wants to burn anyone “wasting” precious bandwidth. If it becomes a popular opinion that Verizon means slow data, folks will seek alternatives even in areas where Verizon is dominant.

It’s ironic that the people who stand to make big-time, bat-crap, beaucoup bucks out of an Internet that’s speed-volving to a mobile model are the very people doing their utmost to stop that evolution in its tracks. For example, if LTE is really the wireless medium that all us worker bees should use to make our hive lives happy and Web-enabled, why didn’t the providers push customers to Voice over LTE? LTE makes much more effective use out of its available radio spectrum, but instead of seriously reaching for an LTE-only goal, the big V paid it lip service and kept right on using CDMA 2000.

That’s only one factor of many. For example, Verizon’s claims of bandwidth “scarcity” in some areas may be legit, but not because an evil percentage of its customers is using too much radio pipe. Rather, it’s because Verizon never upgraded that infrastructure enough to support even a portion of the mobile-connected lifestyle it wanted us to live (and pay for).

Verizon wants have its cake and eat it — on your dime

Nothing exemplifies that shortsightedness better than the supposed target of the new throttling measures: the top 5 percent of Verizon’s data customers — “those downloading 4.7GB per month or more.” Granted, I’m an aging wrinkle factory, so I use my phone’s data mainly for sharing angry reader email with my barfly friends, keeping my calendar, and settling the occasional argument over which actor starred in what movie. Thus, I don’t get anywhere near 4.7GB in a month.

Fine, I’m an old fart set in my ways. What else is new? How about the next two generations of users, who pretty much live through their phones? Verizon is urging them to do so, via everything from expensive TV commercials to secret mind control experiments. Yet, if they stream two Netflix titles and a Steam game or two or maybe play five minutes too much Farmville, they can bust that 5GB cap faster than the NSA can crack a firewall. Their next movie will probably cost another $10 in overage fees, to say nothing of Bezos’ cut.

Now add in the gargantuan, never-ending deluge of mobile apps that require a phone’s data capacity — everything from cement-brained Yo to tracking your kid’s afterschool whereabouts to getting step-by-limp directions to the nearest hospital because you stepped off the curb while looking at your phone instead of where you were going. Hell, PirateBay just went mobile, which will mean a massive uptick in illegal downloads of questionable material.

Then factor in pervasive tethering and new form factors that enable new apps. The ease with which you can smash through 5GB, 6GB, or 8GB in a month living that kind of life is ridiculous.

Verizon wants us to live that life, while it demands an arm and a leg for the privilege. With its pricing, it’d be easy to hit an extra $50, $100, or even $200 a month purely from your use of apps and entertainment. Even if I wanted to use all that convenience on the go, I’m certainly not making an extra monthly car payment to do it. Or living in a lower-rent apartment in a crappier neighborhood. Or skimping on necessities like food, scotch, or the very latest glowing rectangle. We’re chronic consumers — we’re not brain dead. We can’t be that addicted to the Web.

Can we?

This article, “V is for Verizon, void of values,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, follow Cringely on Twitter, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.