The throttling recently affected “OES 5262,” a fire department vehicle that is “deployed to large incidents as a command and control resource” and is used to “track, organize, and prioritize routing of resources from around the state and country to the sites where they are most needed,” Bowden wrote.
“In the midst of our response to the Mendocino Complex Fire, County Fire discovered the data connection for OES 5262 was being throttled by Verizon, and data rates had been reduced to 1/200, or less, than the previous speeds,” Bowden wrote. “These reduced speeds severely interfered with the OES 5262’s ability to function effectively. My Information Technology staff communicated directly with Verizon via email about the throttling, requesting it be immediately lifted for public safety purposes.”
Verizon did not immediately restore full speeds to the device, however.
“Verizon representatives confirmed the throttling, but rather than restoring us to an essential data transfer speed, they indicated that County Fire would have to switch to a new data plan at more than twice the cost, and they would only remove throttling after we contacted the Department that handles billing and switched to the new data plan,” Bowden wrote.
I understand throttling, it is based on a rule engine that triggers without any contextual info about the account. But asking to upgrade is clearly bad, and they should feel bad.
Fire, police and other emergency service should have a different class of service. It’s wrong for the fire department to choose a service that can throttle. Fault is primarily with the fire department. The person who selected this kind of service should be fired.
The guy negotiating the service made a bad decision, probably, but verizon could easily put a temporary upgrade on the accounts valid for 2 months or something like that. Gods sake, people make mistake, and this is emergency. You would feel rage if fire department didnt go the extra mile to save a life because you didnt pay your property tax or utility bill.
Fire department made a mistake in their telecom service selection performance which is its job. Also fire department emailed Verizon for service upgrade which seems weird. Why not call Verizon and request an exception? I use email for non-emergency issues. When you selected the wrong service for fire department, it’s a mistake. When you emailed Verizon instead of calling when wildfire is burning and causing huge public risk, it’s a more severe mistake.
I would think we need a regulation on the service level for emergency public service. We need more regulation on this aspect, both for fire department and Verizon. This is too important to rely on human heart.
Too much junk regulation and totally missed good area where we may need better regulation. Better to reduce number of regulations and spend time to study on necessary and important regulations.
