I somehow exceeded Unlimited data?

I have a grandfathered unlimited plan ($130/month), I've used it to tether by not buying a new smartphone since the original droid (35 gigs+ a month), and things have suddenly been going crazy for the last 24 hours. Frequently, I haven't been able to use https links on my phone in firefox or the default browser, but I can get them to work in opera. Non https links to sites like yahoo load instantly. It seems like Verizon is filtering which internet sites I can access at full speed. Internet access through foxfi tethering is hit and miss. Often foxfi it can't detect the internet. Smartphone games lose internet connections very frequently when the 4G bar is high. This has never happened before.

I download a ton of pages when I'm online out of fear of suddenly losing access again. A strategy that works sometimes is restarting the phone and killing all Verizon background apps.

I'm using android 4.4.x and I've been avoiding upgrading out of fear that verizon will kill tethering like they did with the android 7 update. I contemplating doing a factory reset, rooting my phone, and trying to remove all the verizon apps since they made the announcement that they would monitor and police apps.

This is different from the throttling that Verizon did in the GW Bush administration. Back then, after 23 gigs, I hit 3G speed, but sites would still load. Now, everything is wonky.

I know that a bunch of people will say "shame, the contract says you can't tether." But, a lot of kids out there don't remember the conditions for Verizon's use of the private spectrum: specifically, that whoever won the bid couldn't constrain the types of devices people used to access the spectrum. Verizon quickly backtracked on their promise not to, so in my opinion, Verizon broke their promise to the American people by forcing us to use the spectrum a certain way. I have no huge problem with throttling, I've been through that before. But, I do have a huge issue with app policing, content policing, and non-network neutrality of the type that Verizon announced the day after Trump killed network neutrality by signing Congress' bill.

I did buy a sprint Nexus 5, and I have a sim card for it sitting in the top drawer of my desk. If Verizon does crack down, or force me onto their 10 gigs of throttling only plan, I'm going to use Spring, Ting, or both.

But, in the meantime, the question of to root or not to root is weighing heavy.

/r/verizon Thread