Verizon is experimenting with their pricing yet again, this time introducing a new low end data plan that runs for $20 per month and gives you 300 MB of data. That’s not really all that competitive compared to T-Mobile’s 200 MB for $10 or AT&T’s 250 MB for $15, but we suppose people will pay more for Verizon’s whole “no one can build a better network” appeal. Curiously, these plans are only available in Maryland, Washington DC, Virginia, and North Carolina, starting on August 18th and ending on September 30th. Why the time and geographic limit? We’re thinking they want to see if customers bite before offering such a plan nationwide. For casual smartphone users, this is the perfect rate, especially when you consider that most people spend a significant amount of their time near a perfectly accessible WiFi access point. For heavier users, there’s a $30 Verizon plan that gives you 2 GB, and that should prove plenty.
We hope Verizon continues to innovate in terms of business models, more specifically picking up tiered speeds. They’d get a serious amount of applause from us if they gave everyone unlimited data, but then charged you more depending on how fast you wanted your bits delivered. For the email/twitter/facebook crowd, having something as slow as the dialup connection they had in the 1990s is perfectly fine for their needs. For the business crowd that needs to upload that 50 MB PowerPoint deck to their boss, having that 4G LTE pipe be open as wide as it can go is worth paying an arm and a leg for.
Anyway, if you’re the kind of person who wants data, but is too cheap to pay for it, then you shouldn’t be using Verizon in the first place. Between Virgin Mobile, Boost Mobile, and Simple Mobile (oddly they all end in mobile!) you’ve got plenty of choice for prepaid plans that all include unlimited data.
[Via: FierceWireless]