Finally got throttled, unfortunately

ZeroPing · EVDO User Joined: 28 Nov 2007 Posts: 50

I figured it would never happen to me, but it finally did. Last month I used around 14GB on my unlimited connection, and I found out today that Verizon has throttled my service. One of my relatives has been considering getting Verizon EVDO at their house, so I went over with my laptop and performed a speed test and signal test to make sure everything was good to go, however to my dismay was speeds of 20KB/sec down and 20KB/sec up. I figured this might be a tower issue, because at home (around 10 or so miles away) I get 100-150KB/sec down and relatively the same upload speeds.

I called Verizon and reported my issue with customer service, thinking it might have been a network issue in my area or the particular tower that I was accessing at my relatives house, although I figured since we were so close that it was the same tower. The customer service representative said that there was a feature that was added to my account for speed throttling, and she then transferred me to the Verizon Account Investigations department. I spoke with a pretty nice guy that looked over my usage, and said that the 14GB last month was what triggered it, and the account would be unthrottled May 22nd. This does have me a bit curious considering that my account just rolled over into a new billing cycle, but I guess that's just how it works.

One very interesting piece of information that he let out was that there's really only one guy within their department that throttles accounts. I'm not sure if I believe this or not, but according to him it's all a manual process, and this one particular person is in charge of it. Shocked

It was just a little surprising I guess. He said "There's just so many aircards that sometimes it takes a while to get throttled because of the rather large queue".

What probably did me over, although I've fallen in the range of around 10-15GB a month before in other months although not consecutively, is that I forgot to turn off Mozy (my online remote backup software) while connected to my 3G router back in late March and April when I was away from my home and not on my normal DSL connection. With a total of around 13.5GB or 14GB worth of bandwidth going out at a concurrent speed constantly on one tower without moving for a month must have thrown a red flag.

Just thought I would share my findings.