bball":1vw8dyti said:
So in Jo's example, youre buying access to unlimited gallons of oil; however, after you use 800 gallons, the valve is throttled back to deliver a qt an hour until the month resets. Unlimited quantity, but the rate is quite limited.
Its tricky business dealing with these major communication companies. They're light years ahead of govt regulation and intervention. Partly due to the nature of technology and partly due to the ineffective nature of our govt. Its hard for me to defend a company like Verizon, knowing they utilized billions of taxpayer dollars to build the infrastructure (especially in rural areas), in the form of assistance from the govt, and now, rake in the cash because our society is so dependent upon cellular communication.
I do agree with Brute in that no one is forcing folks to use their service.
That is how it works for a single phone but in the case of multiple unit entities such as firefighters or law enforcement it is more complicated and doesn't work based on the total you pay for but rather a total rationed to each unit.
Instead, the 800 gallons of fuel is equally divided between all your units and each unit has the same cap on it. So what happens is your two fire trucks are allocated 200 gallons of fuel, your three pickups are allocated another 300 gallons of fuel and your two 4-wheelers are allocated another 200 gallons of fuel making your total of 800. Obviously the two fire trucks use more fuel than anything else and at the end of the month you haven't exceeded your total yet they have throttled your fire trucks back to a drip of fuel as was the case with the command center.
The work around for this is to do just what the fire fighters had to do which was to use the fuel/data allocated to the four wheelers and at the end of the fire I'd be willing to bet they still had unused fuel/data just as I do.