Verizon CFO Fran Shammo made some pretty unsettling comments at the J.P. Morgan Technology, Media and Telecom conference. Talking about more people making their way onto 4G LTE devices, Fran said, “As they start to migrate onto 4G, they will have to come off of unlimited and go onto the data share plan. That’s beneficial for us for many reasons.”
This makes it pretty clear that Verizon is ditching the grandfathered in unlimited plans for their new data share plans which are to go live soon. Of course it’s beneficial for Verizon who’s set to make even more money from the switch. This is sure to anger a lot of users and is worth noting that Sprint still has unlimited data which could cause some of those grandfathered in customers to make the switch. Unless that is they just signed a new 2 year contract with one of the latest 4G LTE devices 🙂
The new data share plans are said to debut mid-summer and is really not too surprising that they’re moving away from unlimited. 4G LTE results in more data being consumed so they can claim that unlimited will “cost too much” or “negatively affect other customers on the network from excessive usage”. My words, not theirs, but that’s pretty much the line of thinking.
How exactly will the new data share plans work? It’s quite simple. You’ll pay a set rate for a tiered data plan which can be shared by all devices on the account. Instead of having a 2GB data plan for a smartphone, 5GB for a tablet, and so on, there will be just one plan. This brings up an issue though of people more easily going over their data limit, particularly for families. You’ll have to monitor data usage even more than before.
It seems the days of unlimited are fading more and more away. Maybe someone will step up and disrupt the industry. Oh, wait…the towers are owned by the ones who control the industry.