[close04]

Right... until you grandma can’t Skype with you because Microsoft didn’t pay the “decongestion” tax to that neighborhood IP she’s using or every ISP along the way.

Or when the firefighters get throttled because their unlimited data is consumed and your house goes up in smoke.

[Cthulhu_]

I really hope firefighters and other emergency services don't depend on the unreliable mobile network. Those will be some of the first things to go down in case of an actual emergency, along with the power grid.

[slyn]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...

[close04]

They rely on it because there's no real good alternative for data. Europe uses TETRA [0] (the equivalent of the North American P25 but with better data support among other things) for critical communications but still needs a TETRA + 3G/LTE hybrid for large data transfers (above the hundreds of Kbps order speeds TETRA offers).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio

[admax88q]

Most fires that require an emergency response are not at the scale that could possibly impact cellular serivce. Even a whole neighbourhood going up in smoke isn't going to take down cell towers unless that tower happens to actually be in the middle of that neighbourhood.