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Verizon To Offer iPhone Users Unlimited Data
Hugh Pickens writes "The WSJ reports that Verizon Wireless, the country's largest wireless carrier, is confident enough in its network that it will offer unlimited data-use plans when it starts selling the iPhone around the end of this month, a person familiar with the matter says. Such plans would provide a key means of distinguishing its service from rival AT&T Inc., which limits how much Internet data its customers may use each month. Verizon has a lot at stake as it starts to carry the iPhone, which it is expected to announce Tuesday at an event in New York City. Verizon, more than any other US carrier, has built its reputation on its network quality, and any stumble in handling iPhone traffic will call into question Verizon's major selling point. On the other hand, if it does handle the iPhone well, then AT&T will have a harder time arguing it didn't mismanage its own network. Anthony J. Melone, Verizon's chief technology officer, says the company has invested heavily in its 3G network to handle surging smartphone traffic, including nine million Android subscribers, up from none a year earlier.'"
Perhaps that means they will compete for business and we consumers will win?
I know, fat chance but we can still wish.. right?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maybe it's time for me to actually get a new phone. This bag's pretty heavy.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
...or "unlimited" (subject to "fair use")?
It's a fun rumor, but I'm not sure I believe it.
Verizon certainly does not want a bunch of data-sucking iPhones on their network unless they can make money off of them. So, yes, I could believe that Verizon my offer an unlimited plan for $20 more than what their 2MB/month plan costs. But I tend to doubt they're going to be offering unlimited for the same cost as AT&T 2MB/month plan.
I call bullshit. We should all know the marketing definition of "unlimited" by now.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Verizon is going to announce a new Windows phone tomorrow, the Kin(g) of Kins.
- by someone close to the matter
I'm not qualified to have much of an opinion about these things, but I will be watching with the utmost curiosity where AT&T will wind up now that they have lost their exclusivity with the Apple crowd. Any predictions out there? Methinks it looks bad for AT&T...
And that is why you still will have a crippled smartphone. I'd prefer a 20gb plan and then be able to use it for what i want. What is worse is that people in other countries is still under those stupid limitations like you can't download podcasts or other data over 3G if the filesize are greater than 25 megabytes and Apple does not always allow apps to stream video over wifi.
2GB is actually a huge limit, when you consider that often at home or work phone users are on WiFi anyway. I use my phone all the time and usually hover around the 200 MB limit every month.
Although Verizon's "unlimited" plan might be a nice marketing feature, will it cost more? And will it really be "unlimited", because you know some guy is going to try and push the limit and it seems likely there's really a limit, just not one they advertise...
What would be way more interesting would be making tethering free - AT&T charges $20/month for it (though you can turn it on for just a day here and there and pay a pro-rated rate).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The event is allegedly tomorrow so why can't we wait until tomorrow when it's no longer speculation and actually an established fact?
If I make a blog post claiming that Verizon will offer free blow jobs for new iPhone buyers can I be featured on Slashdot as well?
The ultimate goal of "competition" is to achieve monopoly status, by eliminating competitors. That is what "competition" means.
Once you eliminate your competitors, you can do whatever you want to the market.
Why would you want consumers to suffer through competition?
Note that any bit of protected intellectual property, such as copyrights and patents, would also be a time-limited government-granted monopoly. They are the only items that should be allowed monopoly status, not commodity services like communications technologies.
Commodity services should be government-controlled, since government is better able to handle monopolies than private enterprises.
Every other time it's been clear it's a rumor. This time it's obvious it's no rumor, there are leaks from techs testing and the news is all over the place. It's like saying that there's not going to be an eclipse just because there wasn't one all last year. New data is at hand...
But the really funny thing about your post is, you make it in the same year Duke Nukem Forever is actually set to release for real...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
People frequently drop their iPhone in a mug of beer (HOW?!), or jump in the pool, or some other stupid way of destroying it, then put their SIM card in a basic phone. Then they have a store or customer support remove their unlimited data because oh it's soooo expensive, then expect to get it put back on well after it was announced that the only way to get it back was to never voluntarily remove it. If you already have a smartphone or iPhone unlimited data feature, you are more than welcome to keep it if you upgrade or simply swap phones to another smartphone or iPhone.
If it was removed because someone at Walmart bungled an upgrade or something similar, it can be restored, just don't wait six months to call in about it.
Now, maybe Verizon doesn't know, but some of the heavy abusers of cellular data with iPhones use upwards of 40-50 GB per month. You're not going to use that much data browsing the web, but with a jailbroken iPhone, you can get a 7 to 14 megabit connection shared with a whole network of computers for all of $30 per month... and that is spelled out as abuse of the service in the ToS, which is written in very basic English.
I assume that unlimited data will be revoked again once LTE rolls out, or it will be exclusive to the first iteration of CDMA iPhone.
FYI, the only data services available for the original iPhone are all unlimited data, with varying amounts of SMS message allotments. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.
The article is either crap, paid for by Verizon, or both. AT&T does offer an unlimited data plan for the iphone--that's the plan I have. What AT&T does NOT offer is unlimited data with tethering, where you use your iphone as a data modem for your laptop. The tethering plan is limited to 2 gig a month. If Verizon were to offer tethering with unlimited data that would be ballsy. Yet the word "tether" or "modem" does not even appear in the article.
Remain calm! All is well!
real Unlimited or Unlimited with a big slow down at 5gb?
I have an iPhone. I will not be buying another.
AT&T claims they are still better because on their network you can make calls and use the browser at the same time. AT&T claims that you can not do this with CDMA LTE technology like Sprint and Verizon use. This is a bold face lie. I have a Sprint carried Samsung Epic 4g phone and routinely use the web browser while on calls. Since Sprint and Verizon use mostly identical technology, I cannot believe AT&T's claims that Verizon's phone wont be able to do what Sprint phones already can do... AT&T's statements are merely FUD, I know a lot of people already lined up to leave AT&T once the IPhone is available on another carrier, and AT&T knows and is scared of this too.
[James Earl Jones] We said it was unlimited. I find your lack of faith is disturbing. [/James Earl Jones]
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
How long do you think it will it be before people who have purchased the "unlimited" plan and taken it seriously will receive notices from Verizon saying that their account has been cancelled or disabled due to "excessive" use? And the representatives explaining that they just mean "no stated limit," and that they never dreamed that people would actually download _that_ much, and it is with the saddest and greatest reluctance they have been unwillingly forced to take measures against a few, a very very few evildoers in order to insure the optimum user experience for the vast majority of good Verizon customers, and anyway they never really said it was unlimited because if you scroll 61% of the way down the 150-page online terms and conditions they reserve the right to curtail the usage by any individual in the interests of the greater good of the Verizon network as a whole?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Verizon certainly does not want a bunch of data-sucking iPhones on their network unless they can make money off of them. So, yes, I could believe that Verizon my offer an unlimited plan for $20 more than what their 2MB/month plan costs. But I tend to doubt they're going to be offering unlimited for the same cost as AT&T 2MB/month plan.
AT&T's plans are 200MB/month and 2GB/month, there is no 2MB/month plan, which would be silly. AT&T's 2GB/month plan is $5/month less than their unlimited plan (which you can't get new, but some people still have.) Since Verizon currently has an unlimited smartphone data plan, and its the same $30/month that AT&T's is -- $5 more than AT&T's 2GB/month plan and $15 more than AT&T's 200MB/month plan -- I'd expect that if they offer the iPhone and keep the unlimited plan available the price will stay right there at $30/month.
real Unlimited or Unlimited with a big slow down at 5gb?
Unlimited with a big slowdown at 5GB for $5 more than AT&T's 2GB plan would still be worth it.
I'm ready for a new iphone, but you wont sell me one at a discount because you want to make me wait another year.
Guess what, If you want to keep me, in 1 year when I am off contract, You had better offer me a 32Gig iphone 4 for free or discount the service by $40.00 a month or I'm switching to Verizon.
If you guys are going to be 3rd rate service, then I pay far less.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Grandfathered unlimited data, jail broken iPhone4 running Mywi, don't think I don't think I am going to jump just yet.
I do not play in the middle of the road
I am altering the data-cap. Pray I don't alter it any further.
I love seeing all of the posts making "unlimited" sound like it's a fairy tale. Verizon has NEVER limited my data usage since being forced to remove the "unlimited" marketing if it was actually limited. NEVER. I have had months where I use a gigabyte or two, and I have had months where I used in excess of 6gb (I think I've gone as high as 9gb when an app on my phone freaked out and went in a download loop for an entire night). This is all without tethering. I've never been throttled. I've never been cut off. I've never been charged extra. Hell, I've never been bothered with warnings or other notices. Thanks to court rulings, if the provider says it's unlimited, it really is.
Again, with Verizon, I have NEVER been cut off, charged extra, nor throttled when exceeding the limits claimed by naysayers.
If you must know, most of my data usage is streaming music. Slacker Radio is probably my most used Android app, and I have used the high bandwidth streams ever since it was added as an option.
HOWEVER, there are data caps on tethering and laptop connect plans. These plans have not said "unlimited" for some time now. In fact, as I've repeatedly noted in the past, the 5gb cap is in bold faced text on the website.
the way to "eliminate competitors" in a free market is to have a better product.
That's only one of many ways to beat competitors and not necessarily the most effective one. It's not hard to come up with examples of inferior products that ended up dominating the market. In fact if you look at many disruptive technologies they are often inferior in many ways to the technologies they replace. Price, availability, service, control of a scarce resource such as a raw material or distribution channel, artificial monopolies in the form of patents, better sales people, better personal networks, trade barriers, market entry costs, economies of scale, marketing, and image are just a few of the tools that come into play. The notion of the better mousetrap always winning is pure, unadulterated fiction.
If your product is so good that no one else can compete, then who cares?
That's a nice fantasy but vanishingly uncommon in real life.
If you start trying to abuse your monopoly position, new competition will come.
Not necessarily. You might get slapped down by the government but it's quite possible to establish a monopoly that cannot be dislodged by conventional market forces. DeBeers at one time owned the vast majority of the diamond mines in the world as well as had control of the primary distribution channel. They had a de-facto monopoly on diamond supply which could not be dislodged because there was little product available from anyone else. It would be hard to argue that they didn't abuse their position but the only thing that could really dislodge them was the discovery of new sources of diamonds.
That is what government regulation is for. It is to ensure that the best product wins under its own merits and that all costs are taken into account.
Government regulations do not have that effect. Not even close. Quite the opposite, really.
They do when they are designed well. Granted it doesn't happen enough, partly because well designed regulations are actually really hard to pull off, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's not hard to find government regulations that do indeed increase competition and make commerce more competitive and consumer friendly. Unfortunately it's just as easy to find regulations that do exactly the opposite.
Since your statement "the way to eliminate competitors in a free market is to have a better product" is false.
You are under the false impression that the free market results in better products.
Looking at this from Verizon's POV, sometimes it's OK to come in second place. Think about it...AT&T comes out with the iPhone first. From what we can tell, their network wasn't fully ready and AT&T paid for it hard. Lots of bad publicity from people getting poor connections and data limits. Meanwhile, Verizon's had plenty of time to beef up their network. Realistically, Apple couldn't stay tied to AT&T forever. Bad for business. Eventually the (somewhat) limited market saturates and you sell very few "new" iPhones. Verizon runs #2 in the market. Makes for the most likely expansion place for Apple. Verizon sits back waiting for the opportunity and keeps tweaking its' network. Apple comes a-knockin' and Verizon can point a say "Look at our network. We're ready for you and your customers!" My money is on Verizon having a pretty smooth roll-out. Not to say there won't be glitches, but I bet they come out smelling better than AT&T did at roll-out.
Not me. I'm waiting for the Commodore 64 Phone! That, or the Sinclair ZX81 Phone. THOSE will be game changers, for sure!
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mod up funny
I was seriously considering getting the latest droid phone which has 2x 1Ghz processors and I heard Verizon's signal carries through thick walls and has overall better response and throughput than AT&T.
But now I have to worry that I would have the same problem that I get with my iphone. You have 3000 people in a single cell region or two and at lunch time some of them want to waste time looking up videos. Then I want just want to read the news I have to turn off my phone then turn it back on to get a connection. Oh sure, the phone lies and SAYS it's connected, but when it comes back on it takes 2 - 3 minutes before it establishes a signal with the mothership again.
Meh, I'll stick with my el-cheapo Samsung Intercept on Virgin Mobile for the contract-free rate of $25 a month with unlimited data, text, email etc... the iPhone is great (I love my iPod Touch) but I can't bring myself to pay 3 times as much a month for it. I imagine many smartphone users aren't even aware of Virgin or think (perhaps rightly so) that the network (Sprint) is inferior. I admit it certainly doesn't compete with AT&T or Verizon here in the Boston area but I don't need to watch movies on my phone - and did I mention it's only 25$ a month for (300min) voice and unlimited data?
Government regulations do not have that effect. Not even close. Quite the opposite, really.
Copyrights and patents are fine examples of government regulation that encourages innovation.
I apologize if this was already mentioned, but last time I checked (May 2010), Verizon's unlimited plan isn't truly unlimited. After 5GB of data usage, there is a $50 charge per extra GB. When I figured this out in May, I was quite unhappy that Verizon calls it an "Unlimited" data plan.
than bad.
That is because it is government that is the source of all innovation.
Without government regulation, society would end up being like Somalia.
The more government control we have, the richer people become through better products in the marketplace.
We need to be encouraging more government regulation, not less.
Copyrights and patents are fine examples of government regulation that encourages innovation.
Only moments later, mozumber was introduced to slashdot. The results were not good.
... and then they built the supercollider.
such as "If you start to abuse your monopoly position, new competition will come".
No.
Monopoly positions do not remove themselves through new competition.
They achieved their monopoly position through competition already, so any new competitor will be eliminated as well.
You have a far too simplistic view of economics. Very much a childish idealism, very dreamy, very sweet, very innocent.
I am entertained by it, which is why I am trolling you.
I can hear it now. Android is kicking so much iPhone ass, that Verizon clamoring for the iPhone just proves just how dead iPhone is!
*yawn*
Sorry fanboys. Unless you're getting a cut for every phone sold, marketshare doesn't to you. You're just that guy with a Zune tattoo.
... because it doesn't have heavy users. Wait until the iPhone is introduced and watch the fallout. There is no way any carrier can handle thousands of iPhone users within a small range.
Their entire advertising campaign could be: we are not AT&T. They would still get more iPhone users in 1 year than AT&T managed in ~3 years.
We haven't reached the "enough is enough" point... there is plenty more room for government in everybody's lives.
You are such a libertarian idealist... "If some is good and more is better, why not go all the way and put the government in charge of everything?!" I love it when adults talk this way.. so pure, so simple, so innocent, so entertaining. it's as if you can actually see the brain cells start forming, without going far enough to be able to model the whole economic situation. Not sure why grown adults believe in libertarianism, but apparently some still exist.
The best thing we can do is to feed into that libertarian idealistic hysteria for entertainment value.
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pandora bracelet.
four months into the two-year contracts, they pull that unlimited rug out from under and substitute a paper placemat with puzzles on the back.
Apple has been pissing off customers and potential customers (Me) for too damn long with an expensive phone with ONE carrier. The time they spent forcing people into a mold, one carrier to rule them all demonstrated to me that customer satisfaction is the LAST thing on Apple's mind. Seems its been years that the customers have been begging and screaming for alternative carriers to a deaf ear that leaks little hints that a new carrier was coming. I won't believe it till I SEE it. The apple store, is hell for an iPhone developer who might need to do custom programs for small groups. Oh the guidelines on program design are fine, but there is ABSOLUTELY no place for the situation where someone needs me to develop an iPhone app for just their company where the company might not want the app available on the apple store. Lots and LOTS of work was lost to me because of that. Oh there's workarounds like buying the $299 Enterprise developer deal, where those small groups can run your app as a beta tester - How droll!! Now that similar restrictions are being considered for the next OS X code named Lion, I am even more loathe to trust or believe. Oh don't get me wrong. I love the Mac, I love the quiet of the Mac compared to my PC that sounds like a JET ENGINE tethered to the desk. After getting spoiled by the Mac, I hardly turn on my PC because the fan noise just jangles my nerves. I think the iPhone looks SLICK! I just feel like purchasing an iPhone is putting myself up for disappointment and frustration and putting myself under the yoke of the deaf ear of Apple is just a bit premature. Maybe in a year IF users of the iPhone are happy, then maybe, but not now.
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Is this the same Verizon that a month or so back we had an article where they were ending their unlimited data plans in the next 6 months.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
A "tethering fee" is, to put it bluntly, a stupid concept
I agree totally, IF you got more bandwidth I'd be OK with it but you do not.
So that was why I brought it up, because Verizon could win a lot of fans by not adding additional fees for tethering - even if the data plan cost a bit more!
The only saving grace is that with the pro-rating turning on tethering for a day is cheaper than any paid WiFi anywhere.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If new data tells us there's going to be an eclipse this year, somebody's been fucking up big time for a few hundred years.
a) I didn't specify a year, I was talking generally about the concept of an eclipse
b) There was a solar eclipse just a few days ago - in THIS year. Google for "Solar Eclipse ISS".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And here is the proof :)
What I want to know is: when are cell phone data plans going to be priced based on speed, and not byte quotas per month? Since that's the only real metric that matters.
Our home internet connections are priced by bandwidth. And bandwidth (not quota totals) are what really matter on the back-end, within the cell carrier's own infrastructure. So that's how it should be priced to the consumer.
Gone would be the days of worrying about going over some stupid "quota". You have your speed, and the data will indefinitely roll in at that speed.
Yes, but will Verizon offer the "Dropped Calls" feature I get with AT&T?