All good things must come to an end. In the case of Verizon Wireless, the good thing was unlimited data plans. The end was today. Today, Thursday, was the last day for unlimited data on Verizon; like AT&T and everyone else, Verizon has now gone to a tiered data access plan designed to charge heavy data users for their crimes against the network. Customers with existing data plans won’t be affected by the change, but new customers (and I assume renewing customers) will find themselves paying $30, $50, or $80 per month, depending on how much data they want to eat.
Is anyone surprised by this move? I’ve been expecting it for some time now, personally. Given the meteoric rise in data usage, and the incredible adoption of smartphones among, well, everyone these days, those data usage rates have to have spiked and the best way to keep people from using all the bandwidth is to make it more expensive (versus, say, upgrading your network to handle an increasing data load every few months).
This leaves Sprint/Nextel as the only surviving phone company with an unlimited data usage plan.
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