Today’s Goldman Sachs Investor conference, Verizon’s Chief Financial Officer, Fran Shammo spoke a bit about unlimited data plans. Basically saying that ‘unlimited’ is just a word for consumers. Here’s exactly what he said:
So what customers are understanding and through our good sales routine is once you explain to a customer their usage on a monthly basis, unlimited is just a word, it doesn’t really mean anything and that people don’t really — I think a lot of consumers think they consume a lot more data than they really do. So that whole unlimited thing I think is going by the wayside and they see the benefit of going to the shared.
The thing is Shammo is probably correct with this thinking. While most people only do hit around 2-3GB’s of data per month, those of us that are power users use much more because we use our phones more often. But with Sprint and T-Mobile offering truly unlimited data plans, Verizon might be losing customers to these carriers. If they want to keep their customers and bring more in, they’ll want to add unlimited data plans again, but Verizon is pretty greedy so that may never happen. AT&T and Verizon are both doing shared data plans, do you use them at all? Thoughts on their shared data plans?
With LTE becoming the norm now with all carriers, except T-Mobile, I’m expecting carriers to change their data plans from 2GB, to something larger like 5GB and 10GB. With theoretical speeds of up to 72mbps, you can blow through the 2-3GB data plan in a few hours. So who’ll be first to change their data plans?
Source: Verizon (pdf transcript)