Verizon likely to implement tiered data plans later this year

[Big Cam]

This is totally weak. I use on average 8gigs a month.

Stupid Verizon, Pretty soon it'll cost $100 a motnh for a single frickin phone.

 

[Martin030908]

It says they will implement it when lte rolls out..

Yea, on LTE. I don't believe it mentioned 3g being capped. I could be mistaken however.

Oh yea, your right.. I dont think they will do anything to 3G, it would probably be the equivalent of corporate suicide..

What I was thinking. Plus.... VZW 3g doesn't suffer from congestion like AT&T so a cap wouldn't be looked at to help the data usage, more to make money. Which as you stated, I believe to be suicide.

However, once LTE rolls out, it's a different ball game, they can set it however they like. I can see their point. And it's not like VZW is being as cut throat about a cap as AT&T is. VZW is still keeping the customer in mind. I think it'll be alright.

 

[Shadez]

This is totally weak. I use on average 8gigs a month.

Stupid Verizon, Pretty soon it'll cost $100 a motnh for a single frickin phone.

Well, I dont remember what I paid for monthly phone service before cell phones, but I had verizon. I'm thinking that for those who just use their mobile phones and dont have 'home lines' anymore, its probably gotta be close to what a monthly phone bill was before we had cell phones, but now that Im thinking about it, $30-40 a month seems vaguely familiar for some reason so I may be way off on this.. so I dunno lol

 

[dracos]

there is a lot of jumping the gun in this thread without people reading it. This has been hashed over before by the VZW CEO, the tiered data plan is for LTE only not for 3g. 3G will stay unlimited even after LTE is rolled out, everybody getting bent out of shape and it doesnt effect anyone currently.

 

[dmacleo]

wonder how this affects those grandfathered under the unicel 2$ true unlimited.

 

[LrdElderon]

what they need to do is go after people tethering and charge them, or start enforcing the charge for tethering I thought there was supposed to be.

Cutting unlimited on phones that basically run off nothing but data is pretty stupid. I don't see how the "majority" are only using around 800MB a month. Are they serious or just stupid? you hit that with just web and email with some app store mixed in, what about people that actually take advantage of what was offered and promoted... you know, streaming music, video, chat, games...... 3-8 gb a month is a more likely avg. unless the user doesn't use the phone... like at all.

And now we have flash coming, yeah, good fracking time to cut everyones bandwidth morons. The tiers need to offer reasonable data amounts for price, not this ****ty 200mb or 2gb i hear from att. or be unlimited but tiered on speed perhaps (which still sucks) or they are going to be people jumping to sprint in droves.

It's funny that they can offer unlimited now with not much issue, and from what I heard not only is 4g/lte offering way way more bandwidth / speed, it's also cheaper for them for data sent over their network so this "lets charge more" approach is a bunch of crap.

 

[LrdElderon]

I agree there should be smaller packages available for users. I think it would be reasonable to have say 2 gigs for 20$ 5 gigs for 25$ and unlimited plus wifi hotspot tethering for 50$. If you transmit x ammount of data say a gig in 12hours. Have the speeds throttled down to 3g. To protect the network from overload.

you also gotta remember that it is now illegal for companies to throttle bandwidth no matter what the cause. if you look it up on the internet they are not allowed to throttle bandwidth so really its a good idea in theory but unfortunately it would not work. :motdroidhoriz:

I don't think that is correct. I think it's they are not allowed to throttle specific applications, but they can throttle overall bandwidth to control network congestion. I believe that's how it worked, that was basically the issue with comcast, they were singling out bittorrent traffic and throttling it down.

 

[joehmayfield]

i spoke with a area account manager that takes care of agent stores in virginia, and he said that the tiers will be SPEED BASED not usage based and will have the same existing caps for tethering on the 4G network, anything on the 3G network will be unlimited and still the same price.

interesting... first time hearing of this...

This makes more sense because the customers who who the most data want the fastest connections anyway. the customers that use less data wouldn't need the same speed and wouldn't require customrs to keep track of their usage.

 

[naman919]

This is a shame. Especially after the Verizon CEO openly stated that their cost per Mb will be 1/3 of the cost for the company now.


Hmm. So three times cheaper for verizon and God knows how much more expensive for the new tiered plans.

Wow.....smh.

 

[Mojo]

I agree there should be smaller packages available for users. I think it would be reasonable to have say 2 gigs for 20$ 5 gigs for 25$ and unlimited plus wifi hotspot tethering for 50$. If you transmit x ammount of data say a gig in 12hours. Have the speeds throttled down to 3g. To protect the network from overload.

you also gotta remember that it is now illegal for companies to throttle bandwidth no matter what the cause. if you look it up on the internet they are not allowed to throttle bandwidth so really its a good idea in theory but unfortunately it would not work. :motdroidhoriz:

I don't think that is correct. I think it's they are not allowed to throttle specific applications, but they can throttle overall bandwidth to control network congestion. I believe that's how it worked, that was basically the issue with comcast, they were singling out bittorrent traffic and throttling it down.

That is correct. They throttle overall speeds, satellite company's do it all the time under the fair access policy. HughesNet - Satellite Internet | High-Speed Internet Access, Only $99 check that out. I think this would be the best way to control network abuse. With out sticking it to the customer for overage because of data caps. Buckets of megabytes are not the solution. Plus it shows just how greedy these company's are. It will cost a third less to deploy and maintain but charge more for it. Makes no since.

Further more, with faster download speeds people will reach there caps faster. As it is now... most will download larger files over wifi. It just takes to long over 3g. Add 4g speeds now people will start using the network instead of wifi. So they will use more data then what they currently are. So it is not fair to base bandwidth caps off of 3g speeds. This whole thing really makes my blood boil.

 

[Hyde895]

id pay more for an 'unlimited' option.

 

[New2u]

That is correct. They throttle overall speeds, satellite company's do it all the time under the fair access policy. HughesNet - Satellite Internet | High-Speed Internet Access, Only $99 check that out. I think this would be the best way to control network abuse. With out sticking it to the customer for overage because of data caps. Buckets of megabytes are not the solution. Plus it shows just how greedy these company's are. It will cost a third less to deploy and maintain but charge more for it. Makes no since.

Further more, with faster download speeds people will reach there caps faster. As it is now... most will download larger files over wifi. It just takes to long over 3g. Add 4g speeds now people will start using the network instead of wifi. So they will use more data then what they currently are. So it is not fair to base bandwidth caps off of 3g speeds. This whole thing really makes my blood boil.

I completely agree with you. 4g is supposed to be 100% better then 3g, and the speeds far outweigh that of 3g, i think if verizon doesn't have an unlimited data package, then it's based solely off of greed. Yes there are a few who abuse the system, but most do not.. even according to the article which states most users use 600-800MB. If they want to offer lower priced plans for people who only want to pay for say 2GB and make it like 15$ then that's one thing, but to go from unlimited at 30$ to whatever they will be making you pay soon, is outrageous, and would solely be based on profit. If they allow unlimited on 3g, then they should do it under 4g, after everything i've read, there would be less congestion and less upkeep with the LTE anyways, and then they want to charge more for it. Surprise, Surprise.

 

[PorcPuffer]

I think another thing were missing is that they wouldnt think about removing unlimited data from current plans. I have a few friends on ATT and they have been allowed to keep their unlimited on their iphones for one reason. Like earlier stated, it is a breach of verizons contract and you would be able to leave your contract at any time. So 600$+ phones would be given to the customers that were smart enough to walk away. New customers may have the limiting but no chance of a current customer having a tiered 3g service.

 

[PhoenixGTR]

And they have to be aware that the current customers will look around for better deals if Verizon doesn't present them with a viable option come renewal time.

Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

 

[Taegost]

That is correct. They throttle overall speeds, satellite company's do it all the time under the fair access policy. HughesNet - Satellite Internet | High-Speed Internet Access, Only $99 check that out. I think this would be the best way to control network abuse. With out sticking it to the customer for overage because of data caps. Buckets of megabytes are not the solution. Plus it shows just how greedy these company's are. It will cost a third less to deploy and maintain but charge more for it. Makes no since.

Further more, with faster download speeds people will reach there caps faster. As it is now... most will download larger files over wifi. It just takes to long over 3g. Add 4g speeds now people will start using the network instead of wifi. So they will use more data then what they currently are. So it is not fair to base bandwidth caps off of 3g speeds. This whole thing really makes my blood boil.

I completely agree with you. 4g is supposed to be 100% better then 3g, and the speeds far outweigh that of 3g, i think if verizon doesn't have an unlimited data package, then it's based solely off of greed. Yes there are a few who abuse the system, but most do not.. even according to the article which states most users use 600-800MB. If they want to offer lower priced plans for people who only want to pay for say 2GB and make it like 15$ then that's one thing, but to go from unlimited at 30$ to whatever they will be making you pay soon, is outrageous, and would solely be based on profit. If they allow unlimited on 3g, then they should do it under 4g, after everything i've read, there would be less congestion and less upkeep with the LTE anyways, and then they want to charge more for it. Surprise, Surprise.

One other thing to keep in mind as well is that the average *current* user utilizes that much data bandwidth in a month. Like you said, higher speeds may mean higher usage, but there is another thing as well that everyone seems to be forgetting:
VZW has said that by 2012-2013 *ALL* voice traffic over the LTE network will be VoIP, which is going to greatly increase the data utilization on the network. Now, this argument can be used both for and against the tiered pricing, but let's do the math here... Let's assume on the low end of the spectrum of 600M data, 400 minutes of talk time, and 64kbps encoding.

64,000bps * 60 seconds = 3,840,000bp/m
3,840,000bp/m * 400 minutes = 1,536,000,000 bits total
1,536,000,000 bits / 8 = 192,000,000 bytes total voice for the month

If we take the 600M that we started with, and add the 192M we just added with VoIP, we're at 792M. That's an increase of 32% of data usage in just this one low-end example.
So, if we continue this example to it's logical conclusion, VZW has stated that they expect LTE will cost 1/3 the price of 3g for the same amount of bandwidth. From this moderate example above, we see that their traffic increased by about 1/3, which means that technically, the price of bandwidth is reduced to only being 2/3 the price of 3g. If we factor in the high-end users (that whole 98%/2% thing again) then we'll probably see that the cost to run the network would be about the same as with 3g, but with much better efficiency.