Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said that Verizon Wireless plans to offer shared or family data plans sometime in 2012 and look for other carriers to follow suit too.
McAdam said that people are tired of paying for a smartphone data plan and also having to pay for a data plan on their tablet or USB modem. Additionally, if you’re on a family plan and want to have multiple smartphones, each smartphone has to have its own data plan. That should be changing by next year and users should be able to purchase a “bucket” of data which can be spread across multiple devices and across multiple lines.
“I think in 2012 we will see it,” McAdam said, according to FierceWireless. “We have been working on this for a couple of years. Getting to one bill and getting to account-level pricing is our goal.”
A shared data plan is something that I’ve been wanting for a long time, as having mobile data built into a tablet is a fantastic convenience but it’s not worth shelling out for another two-year contract. There’s no word on what the pricing would be but we’re coalescing around $10 per GB (look at some of the data overage charges). While I would love a truly unlimited plan for all my devices, I think $50 for 5 GB of data across all your Verizon devices could be fair.
How much would you pay for a shared data plan?
[Via FierceWireless]