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Verizon Says It Knows You Don't Need Unlimited Data (digitaltrends.com)
Ed Oswald, writing for DigitalTrends: While the wireless industry is moving back to unlimited data, one carrier is not. Verizon chief financial officer Fred Shammo told attendees at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference in New York on Thursday that his company doesn't think you need it, and slammed current offerings. "At the end of the day, people don't need unlimited plans," Shammo said. While this is not the first time he's said this -- in March he claimed unlimited data "doesn't work in an LTE environment," and in 2011 he helped Verizon move away from unlimited plans -- it's now an entirely different market.
The issue really isn't "unlimited data". The real issue is people would like to just go about their business and not have to constantly worry that they are "using too much".
Um, the term "use" certainly applies in a relatively normal fashion - whatever data distribution hub I'm connected to has a finite bandwidth, and every MB/s I'm using is a MB/s no one else can use. Unlike much infrastructure, usage level doesn't really increase the rate of wear and tear, but you still have a finite resource to allocate at any given moment.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yes, it's not like the customers pay them every month for a service that costs pennies on the dollar to provide, and it's not like these telecoms routinely take government dollars to "upgrade" their networks, right? Yes, why if they don't charge you an arm and a leg using an arbitrary metric they won't be able to upgrade their network, which is why the US has the best service in the world, right? Oh, wait no.
I don't need unlimited data. I just need data that isn't 5,000% overpriced.