It never ceases to amaze me how worked up people can get over an outage, yet still balk at tiny costs. This puts me in the unenviable position of defending Verizon here. People are painting this as Verizon being usurious, and not as a lack of proper capacity planning on the fire departments part. What is the actual problem here?
- Verizon wasn't price gouging or changing the terms during a time of emergency.
- The emergency services certainly are important, which is precisely why they should be buying the appropriate services for their needs. Rather than blaming Verizon for not giving them a free ride.
Verizon has stated terms on their service levels, and what can be expected. They offered to change the service level instantly for the published price. No penalties or special fees etc... While their "Unlimited" verbiage may be misleading to the uninformed, any professional ops person would understand and expect this.
Consumer level services built on light usage are a constant thorn in the side of operations people everywhere. It creates extremely flawed expectations on the business side for what reliable/high usage systems cost. I guarantee there was someone in the chain who wanted proper planning on this wireless data service, and was shut down with "whatever, I don't care about all your tech babble just get the $40 plan it works fine for [other use case]." Now rather than take responsibility for the operational failure, the organization blames a vendor for not providing free additional services.