Verizon – you either love them or hate them…or like many, tolerate them. They are the still the largest wireless carrier in the U.S. based on retail connections, including both postpaid and prepaid subscribers, although AT&T is hot on their trail. After T-Mobile started its assault on the ‘big boys,’ AT&T quickly caved in and started to lower prices and offer incentives for their customers to stay and for new customers to move over to their network. Everybody thought that Verizon would follow the others, but they held firm, instead, concentrating on doing away with subsidies and unlimited data – angering their customers even further. Verizon, or their CEO Lowell McAdam, seems to have the ‘take it or leave it’ attitude, knowing that most people will stay because of their normally good coverage.
Verizon has slowly, but surely, worked on re-positioning themselves – some moves, like wanting to do away with subsidizing our smartphone purchases and forcing us into a Device Payment Plan or their Edge option, are out there in the open for all to see. Especially when they eliminated unlimited data about two years ago – that really had a lot of people, including myself, upset. However, others they are doing are not so obvious, but you can be sure these moves are benefitting Verizon, not their customers. Many did not realize that Verizon killed off their Device Payment Plan on July 13 – the same day they extended Verizon Edge to include tablets.
While we may not be as good as Edward Snowden, most techie people are a resourceful bunch, and in the past two years we have found many ways to keep our unlimited data – they are called loopholes. Verizon killed our chances of keeping unlimited data by eliminating it if we used an upgrade option. That left two ways we could keep unlimited data…one way was if we were willing to pay full price for our device on their Device Payment Plan – until they did away with that July 13. The second way around it was if we used an upgrade on a separate $9.99 dumb phone line to purchase our new smartphone, allowing Verizon to charge us a monthly $30 for a 2GB data plan, then transferring the new smartphone to your old number, and then the monthly fee would revert back to $9.99. You end up with a new smartphone on your grandfathered unlimited data plan, because you did not upgrade that line – you simply transferred the new smartphone to that number – pretty slick.
Starting August 24, that loophole or option will be closed by Verizon. If you purchase a smartphone on the dumb phone line, you will now be required to pay on the $30 2GB Data Plan for a full twenty-four months. You can still transfer your new smartphone over to the unlimited data line; however, you will have an extra $30 a month to pay on the other line. To avoid this new requirement, Customers can switch to MORE Everything Plans or purchase a non-contract smartphone via Verizon Edge at full retail. According to our source Verizon said they are doing this because (and it makes sense) that when it “gives customers a discount on the retail price of a smartphone, we expect them to pay for data services and keep the smartphone activated for 2 years. This change closes the loopholes which allowed customers to activate/upgrade a smartphone and immediately revert back to a basic phone, resulting in a discontinued smartphone with no associated data plan.” Please hook up with us on our Google+ Page and let us know what you think about Verizon as a carrier – love ’em, hate ’em or simply tolerate them – as always, we would love to hear from you.