Verizon Sneakwrap Tactics Channel the Ghost of @Home

It’s a time-honored marketing tradition in the Internet access business to promise the customer anything, and then renege on any promises that turn out to be inconvenient by changing the service’s terms and conditions. In fact, back in the dotcom boom days, it was just such a move by the then growing broadband giant @Home.com that led me originally to coin the term “sneakwrap.” Thankfully, @Home is no longer with us, but Verizon seems to be taking an eerily similar approach with its wireless Internet service.

“About a year ago Verizon, began selling ‘unlimited’ high-speed wireless internet access for $60/month,” a reader writes. “A lot of people signed up, including me. Apparently it has now gotten popular enough that the system became saturated, so last month they made a ‘management business decision,’ as one Verizon employee called it, to throw the top X percent of users overboard. They did that by creating, after the fact, an arbitrary, undocumented limit on the bandwidth you can use.”

In September Verizon terminated the reader’s wireless Internet access while he was traveling. When he returned home he discovered a letter that Verizon had sent him a week before they cut him off. The letter reader in part:

“As you know, the terms and conditions that govern your NationalAccess and/or BroadbandAccess account, which were provided to you at the time of service activation and which are posted on VerizonWireless.com, only permit Internet browsing, email and intranet access. All other activities, such as streaming and/or downloading movies and video, are expressly prohibited by the terms and conditions. A copy of the terms and conditions is enclosed.”

“We recently reviewed your Verizon Wireless NationalAccess and/or Broadband Access account and found that your usage over the past 30 days exceeded 10 Gigabytes. Your usage was more than 40 times that of a typical user. This level of usage is so extraordinarily high that it could only have been attained by activities, such as streaming and/or downloading movies and video, prohibited by the terms and conditions. Based on these facts, your extraordinarily high levels of usage conclusively demonstrate a violation of the terms and conditions, and your account will be terminated on 9/20/2006.”

In fact, though, the bandwidth the reader used wasn’t from any of the actions prohibited by Verizon’s terms but from helping his database clients remotely. “It doesn’t matter if you use your account for watching live porn video, sending mass spam, or, like me, assisting your database clients,” the reader wrote. “Go over their secret limit, and Verizon treats you like a criminal. And when you call tech support, they immediately transfer you to their rude security/fraud operation. ‘You abused and damaged our network, so you were terminated’ is what the security guy told me.”

If Verizon had informed him that their “unlimited” service had a bandwidth limit, he would have been willing to abide by it or pay extra. “I do understand the tragedy of the commons phenomenon, and I know that finite resources must be allocated,” he wrote. “I would not object to being billed monthly per gigabyte, or even to being billed at a usurious rate for usage over a prespecified threshold. But in their advertising, “unlimited” is the big selling point. Nowhere do they reveal the daily usage quota – which with great difficulty I finally discovered to be 166M per day — or any limit of any kind. They kick anyone off who uses more than that and pretend it’s because they caught you streaming kiddie porn or something.”

“Because Verizon wanted to set a limit when none had existed, and then change it whenever it wants, they can’t actually admit that there IS a fixed limit,” the reader wrote. “Their terms of service only prohibit certain USE of the system. This implies that they MUST treat you like a criminal in order to be consistent with the contract. And because Verizon pretends that the service is unlimited as a marketing scam, there can be no option to pay for extra bandwidth. If their ‘business decision’ to cut your throat leaves your clients screaming at you, too bad. They just want to sell their access service as ‘unlimited’ to get lots of people to sign up, and then terminate the ones who use more than average because it’s cheaper than adding capacity.”

There really are a lot of parallels between what Verizon is doing with its wireless Internet service now and what @Home did with its cable modem service back in 1999. For Verizon customers’ sake if not Verizon’s, let’s hope the parallels — including the swelling cacophony of Verizon gripes of all sorts that I’m hearing – diverge soon. After all, @Home is no longer with us, so that’s not a road even a giant like Verizon wants to keep going down too long.

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