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Verizon Boosts Price of Grandfathered Unlimited Data Plans By $20 (theverge.com)
nicholasjay writes: In November, Verizon Wireless is going to start charging its customers with the grandfathered "unlimited data" plans an extra $20 for the data. This is obviously an attempt to get people off of the old unlimited data plans. Even though a Verizon spokesperson confirmed the change, I'm hoping they won't go through with this plan — but right now I'm weighing all my options.
This is being reported all over. Here's a link from CNN Money.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/0...
wouldn't this constitute a breach of contract?
Those bastards!
Grandfathers are usually on fixed incomes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'm not even in an area where I have good service with T-Mobile (it's actually not that bad although I'm in a remote area with less service coverage than most people would desire- ie no 3G/4G/5G) and yet I still stick to T-Mobile. Verizon is the equivalent of Comcast in the cellular industry. They've done all sorts of horrible things from cooperation with the NSA to crippling phone lines and landline internet services to prevent users from switching *back* to services they are legally required to offer (ie it costs the customer money to have someone come out and re-wire ones house). They even hate standards choosing to stick to there stupid proprietary formats (and yea- I know it has some advantages in certain areas- but come on- I shouldn't need to own multiple phones to switch between providers or travel). They've also stopped rolling out fiber service to areas where they think it won't be 'cost effective' despite promises to do so. Lets not forget that the government stole our money and funded these projects to begin with- and then never fulfilled there obligations!
"Even though a Verizon spokesperson confirmed the change, I'm hoping they won't go through with this plan"
I hate to break it to you, but they are going through with this plan.
I've been hanging around on my old grandfather'd Verizon plan for ages because of the unlimited data. I had been recently considering switching to Google Fi. This just dropped a 50 ton weight on the other end of the see-saw I've been balancing on. Good bye and good riddance Verizon!
Once a person is on a plan, the "plan" cannot change without prior written consent of the customer.
Have fun with your class action lawsuit there Verizon., you're gonna end up giving all the grandfathered accounts free unlimited for life.
Used to mean the price was the same too. AT&T has been telling people they're tethering on their unlimited plan to boot them (even though there is no proof in many cases), Verizon is upping the price of their unlimited grandfathered plan to get people to switch to a more lucrative plan for the company, and then there are T-Mobile and Sprint. T-Mobile changed their unlimited policy to not raise when they throttled data and only during heavy load times, and Sprint has unlimited everything for like what $50? You can really see that if AT&T merged with T-Mobile those customers would have been a lot worse off. I used to have T-Mobile when I got back from Germany (it was Voicestream then) and when I turned on my Tri-Band Motorola their name came up so I signed up. It was great and I only switched off to AT&T for the iPhone 3G. It was worth it cause of my companies AT&T discount, now when my contract ends and my family members on my plan get off to another one I'm getting a dumb phone, not sure which carrier I'll move to, but I'm done with smartphones. The only smartphone I'd stay for is the new Windows 10 phones with continuum, but since I hardly ever use more than a tablet at home (on a computer all day at work) I don't really have the need for a PC/Phone. But a week long battery life with a dumb phone is the way to go for me in the future I think. I'll probably use my 1520 as a GPS after that since all the maps are saved to it (I did that to save on data usage and to have faster load times).
My wife and I switched to Boost and we spend $50 on the same plans that costed me $90 before. Yeah I had to switch my phone number but the savings have been good. I'm even tempted just to drop the data plan and use only wifi on anything that work doesn't pay for.
If I had the time, I'd write an app to burn data just to piss off big red. Since I'll be paying almost double for my unlimited data, it sure seem likes I should start getting a better value for my money?
Seems like a simple app:
-->If on 4G with excellent signal and over some battery full % (user configurable)
------>Download random data and discard, just to burn bandwidth.
------>Rinse/Repeat
I've put of with a lot of BS from VZW to keep my grandfathered unlimited plan (locked bootloaders, crippled features VZW disables, etc), but jacking up the price like this really pisses me off.
Once a person is on a plan, the "plan" cannot change without prior written consent of the customer.
Have fun with your class action lawsuit there Verizon., you're gonna end up giving all the grandfathered accounts free unlimited for life.
Does this still apply if the customers are on a month-by-month plan? There's no contract at that point, as the contracts only lasted two years and they have long since expired.
Actually it can. The contract people agreed to when signing up for service says that they can change the price at any time. However, if the price goes up you have the right to back out of the contract without paying the early termination fee.
Darth Vader: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
Verizon: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
Kind of hard to tell them apart if you ask me.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Kind of hard to tell them apart if you ask me.
No one dresses up like Verizon on Halloween?
Vader works for AT&T. They use the Death Star as their corporate logo.
I was a founding joiner of Sprint. Worked for Qualcomm, got a good deal on a Qualcomm candy bar. Anyway, I had unlimited data and a pretty good price on Sprint for about 10 years. Then they let me know they are moving me to a 3 gig plan and I get to pay a bit more for it. I said no thanks and moved to AT&T. That was 10 years ago. Sprint has spent time and money trying to woo people like me back. I think of the 1000's of $ that Sprint did not make off of me in an attempt to gouge every last cent out of me. When AT&T come and tell me that I no longer have unlimited data, I'll find something else. But AT&T not attempting to renegotiate my plans has resulted in a family of 5's iPhones, and iPhone upgrades and a $200 a month plus plan. Hum, $2400 a year * 10 years is $24,000. So Sprint, that is what your brilliant plan to gouge me cost you.
Same with cable. Went to satelite. Now I am planning to drop off satellite and use my unlimited AT&T LTE connection feed my house.
there are no active "plans" that are unlimited, only fools think they can sue this one out.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Darth Vader: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
Verizon: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
Comcast: "I am altering the deal. I will alter it further."
"Can you fear me now?"
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Kind of hard to tell them apart if you ask me.
Vader is generally competent, a big blind spot around his kid aside. Verizon, OTOH...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Have fun with your class action lawsuit there Verizon., you're gonna end up giving all the grandfathered accounts free unlimited for life.
Unless you can prove the contract illegal, have fun trying to get a class action lawsuit when you agreed to Supreme-Court-upheld forced arbitration.
My wife and I were on the AT&T unlimited data plan which got grandfathered once they dropped that plan. AT&T was very interested in pushing people off of that plan which they achieved by throttling people who used too much data. My wife received notice that her data was going to be throttled for the remainder of the billing period for going over around 3 GB. This happened right around when T-Mobile started their "un-carrier" plan which included unlimited data, voice and text. We left AT&T shortly after and never looked back. Thanks to AT&T's shortsighted push to get people off of their unlimited plan, we found T-Mobile which has kept improving what it offers customers (we recently visited Canada and, thanks to their new plan which was added for a few dollars, we were able to use 4G /LTE data, make and receive unlimited calls and use text without worrying about data caps and ridiculous international overage charges). Verizon is doing ht same thing here. Is it really worth losing customers just to drop this unlimited plan? They lose out on added lines (we added another family member to our plan plus a couple of iPads which get data through T-Mobile now).
As long as AT&T and Verizon continue to treat their customers with contempt, people will continue to leave for greener pastures.
Why do carriers act like customers are their adversaries to be tricked and manipulated?
Everything has a price. Why don't carriers try to figure out how much to charge for truly unlimited data that they will be happy with even if the customers actually use it and offer it at that price? Someone will surely buy it, even at a high price... then all it would take is another carrier to offer the same deal at a cheaper price to provide competition and eventually the price should eventually correct to a fair market value.
Is there some reason that carriers won't offer these golden plans? Sounds like oligopoly to me...
Hahaha....unlimited free for life. More like a $5 dollar gift card.
The thing that Verizon doesn't realize is that the type of people that hung onto this plan for 3 years are not the type of people that will stay with Verizon if they get off of unlimited, its the type of people that hang out on slick deals. They are going to be left with just the people who use 50+ GB a month and the ones that use 5-10GB are going to switch to another carrier where they can pay half the price for that amount of data.
It never applied even for customers on a contract. GP apparently never read the contract they signed with Verizon.
Well, it could be worse...
This Deal's Getting Worse All The Time
When you use more than 200 GB's a month, it takes more than 20 bucks to make you think about switching to a *uck everybody oops i mean a share everything plan... say they charge 20 bucks for 2 GB, so that would mean I'd have to pay 2000 dollars for 200 GB's... yeah I'll keep the unlimited... Also there has been some mention of letting grandfathered's use their upgrades... that's pure BS... The minute you press that button Verizon will put you on a minimum data plan and not tell you so they can get a big payday from you.. I haven't called customer service in four years because they'll move you off it in a second and CSR's get bonuses for doing it. I wonder what verizon's real world throughput per tower is.. because I'm betting they're using less than 10 % off of most rural towers... My point on that is they could easily handle a geometric increase in traffic with the bandwidth and towers they have and give everyone unlimited data but it's more profitable to meter to an insanely low threshold and charge 3x as much for an average customers unfettered usage...
It only goes into effect on those who are "off-contract" and on month-to-month. If you are "on-contract" with unlimited data, it remains $29.99 until the end of your contract.
Their contract lawyers have thought of everything so don't worry.
And the Supreme Court has upheld the forced arbitration clause which gives them even more leverage to fuck people over.
Stop spewing your bullshit, you disgusting hasbara troll. Fucking racist loser.
So that's why Verizon got James Earl Jones to do their commercials.
The t-mobile plan I have on my hotspot is unlimited in the sense that there will never be overage charges, but after a specified usage it reverts to a much slower connection. The main advantage is not having to worry about large unexpected charges.
My Verizon hotspot has 15GB, but I have to watch to make sure I don't go over, because on their plan the overage charges add up very high very fast.
Yes, I have two hotspots. One stays at home and is my full-time internet service there. The fastest DSN I can get in my location is half the speed of my mobile hotspot.
I used to have a Sprint unlimited hotspot; they took that plan away from me, so I switched to a Clear device with an unlimited plan. That worked very well until Sprint bought Clear and turned off the local tower. So I dropped that plan and went to Verizon. That made me discover how much better Verizon coverage is, so I also switched my voice service. Sprint lost a couple of hundred dollars a month from me just because they were being greedy.
Apologies for the paraphrasing - We have one of the grandfathered unlimited plans with another company. Frankly, that is the primary reason we have stayed. If they decide to change that arrangement, that would be an incentive to look at alternatives. Up to now the pricing is still marginally better than the competition, but if it increases even $10/line then I definitely will search for another carrier.
... wow, this is like... a nesting egg of awesome.
one guys tosses in islamophobia... for some unknowable reason.
the other guy assumes he's shilling for israel.
We shoulda just given all the jews a state... maybe part of utah or part of new mexico... look what the mormons did with utah, and I at least think the jews are less crazy than the mormons. :)
"You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler," he said to his courtiers — "he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!" Bayezid- ruler of ottoman empire on the explusion of jews and muslims from spain during the spanish inquisition.
All I needed was phone.
Fuc me once shame on you twice shame on me.
I'm sorry that you left AT&T and its unlimited plan. I've been with AT&T since 2008 and its unlimited plan. I pay $70/month, inclusive of everything.
one guy tosses in islamophobia... for some obvious reason -> he's shilling for israel.
FTFY.
My phone is paid for by the company I work for, so data is Someone Else's Problem for now. My wife's phone is paid for by us, and she's been on the AT&T unlimited plan for ages. Every single time she's done equipment swaps, upgrades, any plan changes whatsoever, they very subtly try to sneak her out of the unlimited data plan. She's extremely savvy when it comes to this stuff, but it's amazing how slick they are when describing the change, and once you sign for the changes, you lose access to the old plan forever.
Metered data is going to be the next thing that will force a change in the industry. Once the carriers start turning the prices up just a little too high, and as the massive amounts of data required for even basic Internet usage skyrocket, people will eventually complain.
nah, you don't need to shill for israel to be islamophobic.
i'm under the impression that demographic-shifting waves of muslim immigration into europe have people slightly worried there on that front too... and those europeans are anti-semitic too.
there's no reason he can't hate both muslims and jews, but had to choose one in this situation.
Because you've been a loyal customer for more than 1/3 of your life, we're gonna put some Vaseline on this stick first. Consider how lucky you are.
I would gladly pay $20 more for truly unlimited data. But hey, Verizon happily brags about the fact that it doesn't throttle your data, it just charges you more for overage.
-you don't need to shill for israel to be islamophobic.
No but islamophobia originated in israel. Nearly all anti-arab bigotry is propagated by the zionists.
-and those europeans are anti-semitic too.
Nice try.
Busted, Tricky!
...Free Super Cookies With Every Purchase!!!
Let's hope AT&T doesn't get any ideas. I've been paying the same price for unlimited data for 6 years.
So that's why Verizon got James Earl Jones to do their commercials.
It all makes sense now....
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
However, as time goes by, people use more and more data on their mobile devices. All of which requires additional investment or incentivising customers to lower their data usage.
A few years ago, average data usage on one of the UK's mobile networks was c. 2GB per month. This year, average data usage on the same network is c. 4GB per month. I have an unlimited (genuinely unlimited) plan with the same network and my average monthly usage has gone from 2GB to 15GB in the same period of time.
So, in spite of prices going up, we are probably actually seeing a decrease in the cost per unit used.
I'm wondering how much of that is streaming music or video? Over here in the US, on Tmobile, I average about 1.5GB/mo with a lot of streaming, email and maps usage, but my music is zero-rated so it doesn't show up as used bandwidth.
What's your usage pattern for 15GB/mo?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
AT&T got me to off unlimited last year by lowering my bill, effectively giving me a free iphone 6 plus 64 gig, and enabling free tethering without a jailbreak. My wife and I now share 7 gigs a month with one month roll over so in any given month we usually have between 9-10 gigs should we need them. And as I said we pay less per month than we were before. It is basically a bet that unlimited will come back (like how talk and text how gone that way) before we find a reason to have to start paying attention to the amount of data we use. We were paying $162 a month for two phones, one with unlimited and the other with 2 gigs, and now we pay $150 per month.
got to love the loyalty they have to their long term customers. they collect and sell all my information and they still are going to raise my rate by 20$ i really wish americans werent complete bitches when it comes to torching a companys infastructure when they give them the screw. im willing to believe after the 5th tower burns verizon might consider not screwing us for a change.
Google Fi is pretty darned awesome. It doesn't have unlimited data, but it's a flat $10/GB (only pay for what you use), and you pay the same rate roaming in 60 countries, albeit at 3G speeds.
We all need to try a class action lawsuit. There has to be a law. Adding taxes to your bill is one thing but has anyone ever been on a plan for a long time and the plan itself gone up? No. My dad had a phone for almost 10 years and had certain features no longer offered. They added taxes but never did the minute plan change price or did his text plan. Old ones just no longer offered and new ones were anyone interested send me an email TheRock40359@gmail.com and put "Verizon lawsuit" in the subject
lmfao
So, who is Luke Skywalker then? :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...in the ass.
They claim that less than 1% of their customers still have unlimited data. As if nobody remembers this time last year when they were talking about throttling grandfathered LTE service. Let me see if I can find the info from then...There it is. In August of 2014, they claimed that 20% of their customers still had unlimited data and 95% of those customers use less than 5 gigs of data.
So I'm supposed to believe that they've managed to cull 95% of their grandfathered customers in the last year? Or were they lying a year ago when they claimed that 20% of their customers still had a data plan that hadn't been offered since, if memory serves, 2009. I signed up just before they stopped offering it then bought my next phone in 2011 just before they stopped renewing contracts and subsidizing phones.
And, if they did manage to cut 95% of their unlimited customers in just a year by doing nothing but waiting, why would they bother taking additional action? If the holdouts are down to less than 1%, do they think $20 is going to be what pushes them over the edge?
How am I supposed to take them seriously?