Maybe Verizon needs a good throttling. It's absurd that a Fire department or any public agency concerned with the safety of people's lives should have to be concerned about too slow to use data speeds due to ISP throttling at anytime whatsoever, let alone during an emergency. There's a lot wrong with this picture.
"during large disasters(the fire departments download speeds) had been throttled from 50Mbps to about 30kbps."
The department bought a plan with 25GB of LTE and unlimited 2g. They used up the 25GB and basically wanted more high speed data, for free.
If the fire department needs more than 25GB of LTE for their command center then they need to purchase a plan that will provide that.
I can't stand Verizon, but Verizon did nothing wrong. They gave the customer what they paid for.
If the customer wants a bigger plan they can do like the rest of us and buy one.
The fire department messed up but did not admit it, whereas Verizon admitted its mistake.
UPDATE: In a statement to Ars three hours after this article was published, Verizon acknowledged that it shouldn't have continued throttling the fire department's data service after the department asked Verizon to lift the throttling restrictions.
"Regardless of the plan emergency responders choose, we have a practice to remove data speed restrictions when contacted in emergency situations," Verizon's statement said. "We have done that many times, including for emergency personnel responding to these tragic fires. In this situation, we should have lifted the speed restriction when our customer reached out to us. This was a customer support mistake. We are reviewing the situation and will fix any issues going forward."