I have worked at a mobile ISP before. I don't know what VZW is doing here, but there are a few reasons you might run an experiment. Most often for me it was to

I have worked at a mobile ISP before. I don't know what VZW is doing here, but there are a few reasons you might run an experiment. Most often for me it was to troubleshoot a technical issue. To try to get an idea of user behavior we would run "experiments" on previously collected data, i.e. rely on natural experiments - not change things and then see what happened. In every case the experiments I was part of were to see if we could improve user throughput, not degrade it.