FCC chief slams Verizon’s lame excuse for throttling your supposedly ‘unlimited’ data

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is not impressed with Verizon’s reason for throttling users’ LTE data speeds even though they supposedly have grandfathered “unlimited” data plans. Per The Hill, Wheeler ripped into Verizon’s response from earlier this week in which the carrier said that it was justified in throttling customers’ “unlimited” data because, hey, everyone other carrier is doing the same thing.

“‘All the kids do it’ was never something that worked with me when I was growing up and it didn’t work with my kids,” Wheeler said. “My concern in this instance is that it is moving from engineering and technological issues into business issues.”

Over the last week, Verizon has maintained that it had decided to throttle some of its customers who have unlimited data plans because they were apparently causing congestion issues on its network, which it notes is a common practice in the mobile industry.

However, now Wheeler wants to have explanations from all four carriers about why they claim to offer their customers an “unlimited” amount of high-speed data if that data can just be throttled at their whims. Wheeler earlier also accused Verizon and other carriers to arbitrarily throttling data just as a way to enhance their revenue streams at the expense of their subscribers.