BGR came across an interesting document from Verizon revealing that the company will be throttling data speed for its heaviest data users. If you’re one of Verizon’s top 5% users of data, the company will periodically reduce your data throughput speeds.
Additionally, the company intends to optimize images and videos by compressing them before they get to your device, which will inevitably decrease the quality of the converted content.
As Verizon is starting to take pre-orders for the iPhone 4, this move doesn’t come as a surprise…
Early reviews of the Verizon iPhone show better call quality but slower data transfers compared to AT&T. Depending on what you use your iPhone the most for, sticking with AT&T might not be a bad idea, at least for the time being.
Verizon’s memo reads:
Important Information about Verizon Wireless Data Plans and Features
As part of our continuing efforts to provide the best experience to our more than 94 million customers, Verizon Wireless is introducing two new network management practices.
We are implementing optimization and transcoding technologies in our network to transmit data files in a more efficient manner to allow available network capacity to benefit the greatest number of users. These techniques include caching less data, using less capacity, and sizing the video more appropriately for the device. The optimization process is agnostic to the content itself and to the website that provides it. While we invest much effort to avoid changing text, image, and video files in the compression process and while any change to the file is likely to be indiscernible, the optimization process may minimally impact the appearance of the file as displayed on your device. For a further, more detailed explanation of these techniques, please visit www.verizonwireless.com/vzwoptimizationIf you subscribe to a Data Plan or Feature on February 3, 2011 or after, the following applies:
Verizon Wireless strives to provide customers the best experience when using our network, a shared resource among tens of millions of customers. To help achieve this, if you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand. Our proactive management of the Verizon Wireless network is designed to ensure that the remaining 95% of data customers aren’t negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users.
I look forward to reading your thoughts about this.