A little over a week ago I sat down with my friends over at WBIR to discuss Verizon’s move to finally get rid of all their unlimited data plans for 4G customers. As expected, this move was met with a lot of backlash and Verizon has since modified their statements slightly, saying that existing customers will not have to change until their existing contract is up. Once that happens they’ll be forced into one of the company’s tiered data usage plans. The big sell from Verizon was that their shared data plans allows customers the ability to save money by having all their devices covered on one data plan. This sounds great on the surface, until you consider that if you put all your family members on one plan and they’re now all drawing data using several devices… that could easily end up being a LOT of data; especially if teenagers or techies are involved. To be clear, “saving customers money” generally equals “making less profit”, so I’m usually skeptical of such statements from the get-go. What will you do; switch companies altogether (Sprint is starting to look more and more attractive)… or just hang out?
–Dan Thompson