Six years ago, the Santa Clara County Fire Department was battling one of the largest wildfires ever to break out in California, the Mendocino Complex fire. With thousands of firefighters on the front line, county officials needed to coordinate fire suppression efforts at multiple points.
But they ran into a major roadblock. Their wireless internet had slowed down to a crawl, making it virtually impossible to send or receive emergency communications. Verizon had throttled the internet speed to a fraction of what it was before and then refused to restore it unless the county upgraded to a more expensive data plan, after it had reached its data cap.
To put an end to these practices, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing a policy change that would restore national standards of net neutrality and bring back more consumer protections, reliability and security to broadband connections.