Verizon Wireless announced Monday it will pay a dividend of $8.5 billion to owners Verizon Communications and Britain’s Vodafone Group PLC, by the end of the year.

Together with an earlier dividend paid in January, an extremely profitable Verizon Wireless will return a combined $18.5 billion to investors in 2012.

Verizon Communications, owner of Verizon landlines and fiber optic network FiOS, owns 55 percent of the wireless operation. Britain-based Vodafone Group owns a 45 percent minority interest. Verizon Wireless, like many U.S. corporations, has used excess cash to pay down or refinance debt at historically low interest rates, reacquire stock, or pay dividends to shareholders in lieu of major infrastructure and hiring expansion.

Verizon Communications needs its share of the wireless dividend to help cover dividend payouts to its own wired shareholders. Verizon Communications has been unable to command the kind of high profit margins its wireless counterpart has succeeded in delivering to investors.

Coming this June, Vodafone will introduce an Internet Overcharging scheme for its “pay monthly” mobile customers, dropping “unlimited” smartphone broadband service in the United Kingdom.

From a post on the company’s support forum:

We are planning to introduce Out Of Bundle charging for Pay Monthly customers from 1st June 2010. The reason we’re introducing these charges is to make it fairer for everyone, and to protect our network from data abuse. We’re introducing a real-time notifications service to be completely transparent about these charges and keep customers in control of their spend. No Out Of Bundle charges will happen this month but they will take effect from 1st June. The messages you’ve received this month were sent in error and no more will be sent out from today.

The charging will be as follows:

Monthly bundle customers will pay £5/$7.43 for every 500MB after the first 500MB
Customers without a monthly bundle will pay 50p/$0.74 for every 10MB after the first 25MB

Whilst you’ve all previously been used to there not being any Out Of Bundle charging, the current information available online is clear in explaining that we could introduce such charging at any time. The Vodafone Mobile Internet costs page does state:

We’ll keep an eye on things and let you know your options if it looks like you’ll go over your 500MB Flexi or Value Pack limit.

Our Pay Monthly Terms and Conditions already state that we reserve the right to charge for any usage beyond the Fair Usage limit.

At the same time Vodafone wants to punish customers for using their phones too much, the company continues to heavily market the very phones capable of  “data abuse.”

In addition to the iPhone, Vodafone now also sells a handful of Android phones — both of which are designed for their data service capabilities.

For consumers who believed Vodafone’s marketing and bought an iPhone or Android phone with an unlimited data plan, the rug is about to be pulled out.  Come June, those exceeding Vodafone’s arbitrary data allowances will begin receiving SMS text messages warning them their bills are about to rocket sky-high from excessive usage charges.