Verizon Now Refuses to Stream 1080p to Any Smartphone, Period

For years, advocates of net neutrality have warned against the damage that could be done if companies are allowed to separate the Internet into pricing tiers. Verizon was inevitably going to be the first telco to make this kind of move; the firm sued to block relatively toothless net neutrality requirements once, then got slapped with tougher requirements for its trouble. With GOP FCC Chairman Ajit Pai downright excited at the prospect of gutting both consumer privacy protections and net neutrality requirements, the company apparently feels its time has come. Six months after Verizon promised it would stream video at the native resolution provided by the consumer’s video-on-demand (VOD) service, it’s now reversing that promise — and pretending like it’s doing its customers a favor in doing so.

Starting immediately, Verizon’s “Unlimited” plan is $5 cheaper per month, but only streams video to smartphones at 480p, with tablets capped at 720p. Mobile hotspot performance is similarly throttled; if you hook up a smartphone on the “Unlimited” plan to a laptop, you’ll be stuck pulling the same low quality video as the plan you pay for. “Unlimited” hotspot performance is now throttled to 600Kbps (75KB/s or 0.07MB/s). Good luck doing, well, anything on that.

Four terrible options, four terrible prices!

If you’re willing to pay $10 more per month for a “Beyond Unlimited” ($5 more compared to the “old” unlimited plan), you can have 4GB LTE streaming with your hotspot and 720p video on your smartphone. The hotspot is limited to just 15GB per month, however, after which it throttles down to 600Kbps. Verizon claims that there’s no visible quality boost between 720p and 1080p on a smartphone, and that’s actually fairly true — a 1280×720 resolution screen on a six-inch panel is Retina quality at 14 inches. But there’s definitely a difference between 720×480 and 1280×720 that you can pick up on larger smartphones — and larger smartphones dominate the Android market these days. This also ignores the fact that people could use a smartphone for streaming to a much larger display. In short, at least some people are going to see their video quality whacked with an ugly stick they can’t change or turn off, even if they want to.

Verizon can’t keep from contradicting itself, even in its own press release. The last sentence of the press release states: “And always, if you like what you have today, you can keep your current plan.” Except, of course, you can’t. In the immediately preceding paragraph, Verizon states: “Moving forward, HD video on all legacy plans will also match Beyond Unlimited’s HD quality.” In other words, you can keep your current plan, just not any of the benefits of having it.

The Verge notes a few other gotchas as well. Customers with an “Unlimited” plan can be throttled at any time, even at the beginning of their billing cycles before they’ve used any data. Previously, customers were only throttled after consuming 22GB of data. That rule is still in effect for the “Beyond Unlimited” data plans, but you’ll have to pay $10 more per month for the privilege of using the data and speed you pay for.

There are no advantages to any of these plans for anyone, unless your first name is “Verizon.” The $5 cost savings per month doesn’t actually add up to any savings, since the previous $80 plan actually offered unlimited video streaming and a hotspot connection that wasn’t throttled after a certain data threshold had been reached. It’s a complete reversal of what Verizon offered six months ago, and it’s happening just months after the head of the FCC declared that net neutrality and privacy regulations were choking American companies from innovating. Never mind the fact that these same companies enjoy significant yearly profits and monopoly or duopoly status across more than 60% of the United States.

Welcome to the future.