Verizon Disconnects Heavy Rural 'Unlimited' Data Customers Verizon continues to boot heavy users on the company's "unlimited" wireless data plans off of the Verizon network. Users over at Howard Forums (hat tip, BGR) note that the target appears to be largely rural customers on partner carriers of Verizon's LTE in rural America program (LTEiRA), which provides smaller rural carriers spectrum and technology access in exchange for extending Verizon's cellular reach in these markets. To Verizon customers, there's no obvious difference between being on Verizon networks or these rural carrier partners.

Under Verizon's unlimited plans, users will find their connections throttled after 22 GB of usage for the remainder of their billing cycle. But Verizon appears unable to throttle these users on LTEiRA, so they've begun kicking them off the network entirely. “They’re calling those with billing addresses outside of their coverage areas on unlimited and agreeing to pay off their phones if they will port out, otherwise they will discontinue the service,” one poster said. Verizon has confirmed the effort, but states this should only be minority of customers, some of which the company claims were consuming as much as one terabyte of data per month. "Earlier this month we notified a small group of customers who are out of contract and primarily use mobile data on other wireless companies’ networks that we won’t be their service provider after July 30, 2017," a Verizon spokesperson told Ars today. "This only affects a few people who primarily roam on other networks and does not affect customers who primarily use Verizon's own network." There's some notable additional conversation on this over at There's some notable additional conversation on this over at Howard Forums







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Most recommended from 94 comments

tmc8080

join:2004-04-24

Brooklyn, NY 20 recommendations tmc8080 Member historical trend Verizon cuts and runs from customers who are not profitable. Period!

Defined legacy! No getting around it with fancy marketing, this IS the real Verizon. Nucleartx

join:2016-09-08

Belton, TX 12 recommendations Nucleartx Member No differentiation Verizon doesn't specify which areas are lteira. The customer can't easily tell but Verizon will sign them up anyways.

davidc502

join:2002-03-06

Mount Juliet, TN 8 recommendations davidc502 Member How much does data cost Wireless providers these days? I've done some research on wired providers like Comcast, at&t etc, and it's been a few years, but they were paying small fractions of a cent per Gigabyte (on average) of data traversing their egress/ingress points. This doesn't include the cost of maintaining or upgrading networks, but at the time we really didn't want to know that. There have been many articles over the years that pretty well define it costing a ISP a few dollars a month per customer no matter how much data is used, but that's wired ISP's.



So, if someone is a rural area customer who is using a lot of wireless 3g/4g data, what's that data costing Verizon? Being in a rural area it doesn't seem likely there's a spectrum issue to contend with, so how is data so expensive for these Wireless ISP's that they can't make money off a customer using 1 TByte of data or more a month? mudir007

join:2004-02-09

Wynne, AR 5 recommendations mudir007 Member new tile in 4th bathroom at their 3rd house Maybe if the system wasn't so outrageously expensive, people wouldn't cheat it.

UnloadedOne

join:2015-04-04

Astoria, NY 2 recommendations UnloadedOne Member It's an opportunity Now that Verizon has kicked them off, they can sell these customers on AOL dial up service. This is but the first of many exciting opportunities to be offered by Oath. Can't you see the synergy? It's all falling into place. Tchaika

join:2017-03-20

New Orleans, LA 2 recommendations Tchaika Member Verizon Has To Pay The LTEiRA Network Operators For Every Byte..... It would be nice if there was an acknowledgement of this in the article summary. Every carrier would do this if you consumed gobs of data on a roaming partner network. Back in the day it was done with minutes too. It was actually a backdoor "get out of jail free" card for folks with contracts they wanted to break; make 51% of your voice calls on a roaming partner for three months and Sprint/AT&T/T-Mobile would all terminate your account with no ETF.



Historically, Verizon didn't do this, presumably because they made more money from partners roaming on their network than they paid out for their own customers doing the same. Obviously that calculus has changed. It doesn't help that there are people exploiting the system by cheating on the 10GB tethering cap and using LTE as a landline replacement.



The only thing I would ding Verizon for here is allowing people to sign up for Verizon service with billing addresses inside LTEiRA territory. They should refuse service under such circumstances and push the would-be customer directly to the local network operator. T-Mobile won't sign you up if you live somewhere they have no native network. Don't think AT&T or Sprint will either.