According to Reuters, Verizon will be shaking up their data plans sometime this summer. The first change is the elimination of their unlimited data plans. We’ve heard rumors of this coming for some time now, and I guess its time for it to finally happen. These data plans will be replaced by tiered options. There’s no reports yet of how much data will be included in each tier. If its like other carriers, we can assume 2Gb will be one of the cutoff points. We’re also assuming that people on the old unlimited data plans will be grandfathered.
Their CFO, Fran Shammo, also hinted at another possible change, shared family data, he dubbed as a data “mega-plan”. “We had individual minutes for individual users. Then we eventually got to what we call family share where everyone in the family shares the same minutes,” Shammo said. “I think it’s safe to assume that at some point you are going to have mega-plans (for data) and people are going to share that mega-plan based on the number of devices within their family. That’s just a logical progression.”
He also said their next version of the iPhone will be a global phone, but he did not mention anything about LTE. He also said it would be available on the same day as the At&t version.
Does this come as a surprise to anyone? Every other carrier seems to be tiered, or have a throttle in place once you reach a certain amount of data. Will this force anyone to change carriers?