Will Verizon’s new plans save you money? Will the rest of the industry follow?

This week Verizon Wireless, America’s largest cellular operator, announced sweeping changes to its plans. Instead of offering users traditional plans based on a bucket of minutes, messages, and data, they’re trying something new. When you open a new account with Verizon, you’ll have the option to activate any number of devices: smartphones, feature phones, hotspots/laptop cards, and tablets. Each smartphone and feature phone line will get unlimited minutes and messaging. Each line can also purchase a bucket of data, which is where the big changes come into play. I’ll get into the specifics in a moment. But the big questions this leads us to ponder are in the title. Will they save you money, and will other carriers follow suit? Here’s a quick rundown of the fee schedule. Devices $40: smartphone
$30: feature phone
$20: mobile hotspot or laptop card
$10: tablet Data $50: 1GB
$60: 2GB
$70: 4GB
$80: 6GB
$90: 8GB
$100: 10GB These plans go into effect June 28th for all new users. If you’re a single-line, single device user, chances are you won’t be switching to Verizon. But clearly that’s not who they’re targeting here. They’re aiming for families that use a lot of data, and for individuals who want to connect more than one device. The money you save, then, will be dependent on the devices you connect. If you upgrade in October and get a BlackBerry 10 smartphone, and then get an LTE-capable BlackBerry PlayBook (rumored to hit later this year), you might get a decent deal. You’ll pay $50 for the connections, and then probably $60 or $70 for the data, for a total monthly cost of $110 to $120. Previously you’d have paid $90 for 450 minutes with unlimited messaging and 2GB of data, plus $30 for 2GB of tablet data. So you’re breaking even. The best way to save, it seems, is to partner up with a friend, or friends — or family, or a significant other, or whatever — and share a larger data pool. That first 1GB costs a lot, but the data after that gets pretty cheap. Two people sharing a smartphone and 10GB of data pay just $90 per month, which is the current individual plan for just 2GB of data. So there are plenty of opportunities there. You just have to pay attention to the details and find the sweet spot deal for your usage level (and, of course, the usage of the person or people with whom you’re partnering). It sounds as though AT&T is moving in a direction like this. They said that they’d have minute pool plans available later this summer. Whether they take a cue from Verizon remains to be seen, but this does seem like an efficient way of handling the shift in the industry. It’s clear from Verizon’s actions that legacy voice and messaging systems, longtime profit windfalls for telecoms, are no longer of interest to consumers. If AT&T tries to hold onto the legacy, they’ll fall even further behind. At the same time, underdogs like T-Mobile, Cricket, MetroPCS, and even Sprint could find an advantage by offering an even friendlier plan, particularly for individuals. There is more than one way to share a pool of data, and the onus is now on these small carriers to find a consumer-friendly yet profitable way to ring in the data-driven future. Given that the futures of their companies could hang in the balance, I’m certain we’ll see something different from these smaller carriers in the near future. All in all, it’s good to see the nation’s largest carrier recognizing the importance of data services in the future. They might not have gotten it right, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.