Last minute upgraders are hurrying to pre-order the Samsung Galaxy S3 to buy an additional two years for their unlimited data plans and get one last subsidized phone.

If you are a Verizon Wireless customer, today is the last day to exercise options under Verizon’s existing plans before the company’s new “Share Everything” plan regime takes effect. While some customers will save money on the new plans, at least at first, many others will not. Verizon is not forcing existing customers to change plans tomorrow, but you may find it worthwhile to lock in any unlimited data plan for the next two years, even if your contract is not scheduled to end until later this year. Remember, Verizon may be saving you a few dollars today, but its bean counters know that data is a growth industry, so the more devices you add to your plan, the quicker you will be paying more and more to upgrade your allowance.

Droid Life helps cover some of the basics before we discuss your options:

What are Share Everything plans?

Think of them like the family minute and text plans that you have been a part of for years now, but for data. With a Share Everything plan, you purchase a bucket of data at a flat rate for your whole family to use, just like you did with minutes and texts. You no longer have to buy individual smartphone or feature phone data plans on Share Everything. Deciding which plan will best suit your family is the key here, which requires some analyzing of the amounts of data you are currently using.

How are they priced?

The tiers are as follows:  1GB for $50, 2GB for $60, 4GB for $70, 6GB for $80, 8GB for $90, and 10GB for $100. Along with a data tier, you also have to factor in your “per device” cost which is $40 per smartphone, $30 per feature phone, $20 per Jetpack, and $10 per tablet. Mobile hotspot is included with Share Everything at no extra cost as it pulls from your data bucket. If you would like more than 10GB, you can purchase extra 2GB add-ons for $10 a piece. If you go over your data bucket limit, you are charged $15 per 1GB overage.

Minutes and texting are unlimited on Share Everything plans, so your only worry is data usage.

You can read more about pricing at our step-by-step guide to selecting a plan.

Can I keep unlimited data? Do I have to switch to Share Everything?

Yes, you can keep unlimited data. No, you do not have to switch to Share Everything. We wrote up an entire detailed post on this scenario of keeping unlimited data that I recommend you read.

Should I upgrade now?

Maybe. If you want to enjoy one last discounted (subsidized) price on a phone and keep unlimited data, you have to upgrade before June 28. If you upgrade after at a discounted price, you will have to change your plan to either a single person tier (2GB for $30) or join a Share Everything plan. Further details on upgrading now, including Galaxy S3 pre-orders, can be found at this post.

What if someone on my family plan upgrades after Share Everything is live?

While I have yet to get a definitive answer from any higher-ups at Verizon, it is my general understanding that you can always choose something other than Share Everything as long as you are a current customer before June 28. If you are in a family plan now and one of your lines upgrades after June 28 and chooses Share Everything, it will not affect your line. From what I have gathered over the last few weeks, you would not have to choose to join their shared plan. Also, if you want to upgrade after June 28, you can choose between a Share Everything plan and an individual tiered plan starting at 2GB for $30.

Now it’s time to consider some options:

1. Do nothing. If you want to keep what you have until your current contract expires, do nothing. Absolutely nothing will change on your account until a contract expires and you seek to upgrade your phone (or you can depart for Sprint, T-Mobile, or some carrier not using this new pricing). If you stay with Verizon, you can continue with a month-to-month plan until you seek to upgrade your phone. At that point, you will either have to pay full price for an unsubsidized phone (can be up to $600 or more) or get a subsidy with a new tw0-year contract on one of Verizon’s new plans. You will lose unlimited data at this point unless you bring an unsubsidized phone to the party. But financially that may not make sense. Verizon charges the same monthly rates, designed to recoup phone subsidies, whether you have a subsidized or unsubsidized phone, so you are paying the phone company back for a discounted phone you never got.

2. If you are eligible for an upgrade, you may want to use it today! Log into your Verizon Wireless account and check your phone lines for any eligible for immediate upgrades. If one or more are, today is the last day to consider using that upgrade -and- keep your unlimited data plan. Keep in mind you can activate a new phone on any number on your plan (preferably one with unlimited data, of course) and move them around if one of the people on your account can make better use of a new phone than the person eligible for the upgrade. You will commit to a new two-year contract for each line you upgrade and you will pay Verizon’s phone upgrade fee ($30) per phone.

You can buy yourself eligibility for subsidized smartphones by activating a “dummy” extra line with Verizon Wireless for $9.99/month or use it with an older basic Verizon phone without incurring data charges.

3. If you are not eligible for an upgrade, you can still buy at least two more years of grandfathered unlimited data without buying an unsubsidized phone, but you will pay a penalty. Verizon will allow customers not eligible for an upgrade to add additional lines to their account specifically to qualify for new subsidized phones they can use on any number on their account. Let’s say you have two lines active with Verizon not eligible for an upgrade until later this year, but you don’t want to lose your unlimited data -and- you want one last subsidized phone. Simply call Verizon Wireless and ask them to establish two new lines of service on your existing account with a “dummy ESN” registered in their system. You will pay $9.99 per month (plus taxes and fees) on each line with new two-year contracts for each line, but this will qualify you for an immediate subsidized upgrade to any in-stock smartphone. You can also pre-order Samsung’s wildly popular Galaxy S3 ($199 subsidized, $599 unsubsidized).

You will then have two more years of unlimited data on your new phone. If you have older non-smartphones laying around, you can activate them instead of using the “dummy ESN” method and allow someone like a parent or child to share your existing calling plan without running up data charges or text messages (although you can add those options as well if needed).

You should coordinate this over the phone with a Verizon Wireless customer service representative (1-800-922-0204) explaining you don’t currently qualify for an upgrade but want to establish “dummy service” on a new line(s) to win a subsidized phone. Most representatives are familiar with this. But when the new phones arrive, you will want to have Verizon Wireless handle activation themselves because they are equipped to transfer those new phones to replace the existing ones on your account and not lose your unlimited data plan in the process. If you activate them yourself, they will be up and running on different phone numbers and you will have to visit a Verizon store to obtain new 4G SIM cards to switch phones to the correct lines. Let Verizon handle it, and any messes that might occur along the way.

You will not pay any early termination fee for not using your old phones anymore, but you will probably want to call Verizon about dropping contract-expiring lines on your account when their respective contracts expire so you minimize the number of months you are paying an additional $9.99 a month for extra phone lines you probably will not be using. You will neither pay an activation fee or upgrade fee using this method.

Is it an expensive price to pay for an early upgrade? Perhaps, but maybe not if it means buying another two years of unlimited data service.

It is important, however, that you complete any arrangements to order your phone(s) prior to the end of day today. We strongly recommend you work through Verizon Wireless’ own sales department (they shut down for the night at 11pm EDT) to arrange for new phones or pre-orders (which are acceptable to activate later and still keep unlimited data). If you deal with a third party like a non-Verizon store or website, the order may not process in time to qualify within the remaining hours Verizon’s old plans are still active.

By July 2014, we will be back here again trying to maneuver the renewal of unlimited data plans Verizon now hates. But spending time to preserve these plans may be important to your wallet when you consider just a year ago, Verizon charged $30 for unlimited wireless data. Effective tomorrow, they charge $50 for 1GB of data. Where will we be two years from today? The sky is the limit.

If you die, Verizon Wireless will bury your family’s unlimited data plans with you.

Amidst the brouhaha over Verizon Wireless’ impending transition to new Share Everything plans that will raise the wireless phone bills of a lot of Verizon customers, the wireless company is also quietly inserting a change in the terms and conditions that will strip away the unlimited data plans of surviving family members if the primary account holder passes away.

While the departed may no longer care about keeping worry-free data, surviving family members might:

Verizon Wireless has confirmed to PhoneNews.com that, effective June 28, Assumptions of Liability will be stripped of unlimited data plan codes during the account transfer. New customers receiving the account will be required to select from Verizon’s metered data plan add-ons for legacy Nationwide and America’s Choice II accounts, or switch to a new Share Everything plan.

The main problem, is that this will negatively impact those who suffer a loss in the family. If someone passes away, say a husband, the surviving widow can no longer keep the same plan terms. Worse, a customer cannot port out without an assumption of liability. This creates an awful Catch-22 potential for families looking to keep their phone numbers; either accept massively higher bills under Share Everything, or pay massively high Early Termination Fees to port out.

For many, the move is seen as unsurprising. Verizon’s CFO Fran Shammo stated that “all customers” would be forced onto a Share Everything plan once they went into effect, and upgraded devices. Verizon quickly clarified that customers who waived handset subsidies would still be permitted to keep their unlimited data plans, even when migrating from a 3G smartphone, such as an iPhone 4/4S, to a future LTE smartphone.

Verizon’s move wasn’t intended to directly target dead people, but rather stop customers from selling off their unlimited plans to the highest bidder on eBay. Using the Assumptions of Liability clause, the winning eBay bidder could take over control of a Verizon line grandfathered with a more favorable plan than the company sells today. Bids running several hundred dollars for the assumption of a line with unlimited data were not uncommon.

As PhoneNews reports, “Verizon Wireless defended the lack of a specific mention of this change, citing that they have said all along that Share Everything plans will apply to all new customers. For those suffering the loss of a family member, and use a Verizon unlimited data plan, it will be adding insult to injury that they may be forced off their plans.”

Recognizable New Yorkers are fed up trying to keep track of new security measures thrown at them by their telecommunications companies.

The New York Times Fashion & Style section (really?) took a dive into the frustrating world of pre-assigned passwords, captcha codes, and user verification questions that confound New York’s more prominent citizens, sometimes with hilarious results.

“It’s a nightmare,” the comedian Tracey Ullman told the newspaper. “These passwords just keep getting longer and longer. I try to think of a startling emotional thing that jogs my memory or something that’s frightening, or my grandmother’s name with 666 at the end. But I really don’t know what to do.”

In an effort to respond to an increasingly security-conscious online world, providers are password protecting subscriber information and equipment to keep prying eyes out. But sometimes those anti-hacking, anti-eavesdropping, anti-identify theft efforts become mind-boggling to confused customers who end up locked out of their own accounts.

Among the latest trends: locking down wireless routers with passwords straight out of the box.

Bernhard

Any long time Wi-Fi user already knows America’s largest open wireless network does not come from AT&T or Verizon Wireless. It comes from a company formerly known as “Linksys” (today Cisco). Customers confounded by wireless security simply plug in their new routers and start using them without setting any Wi-Fi password or enabling security measures.

Time Warner Cable tried to lick that problem by issuing pre-assigned passwords to customers using the company’s wireless router. Unfortunately, comedian Sandra Bernhard, never smart to antagonize, ended up with one that came with a mish-mosh of letters and numbers (they range from 13 to 28 characters) that cannot be changed.

“We have that one written down somewhere, but where it is I’d be hard pressed to tell you,” Bernhard told the newspaper, noting that her relationship with the cable provider is “an S&M experience without the pleasure.”

Verizon and AT&T love their creative security questions, designed to verify you are who you say you are. But New Yorkers who think too deeply about the questions are sure to be tripped up by the experience.

Jeffrey Leeds, a fixture on the New York social scene, tells the Times he hates questions like, ‘What is the name of your first girlfriend,’ because he unsure if that means the first girl he slept with or the first one he liked who never returned his phone calls.

The confusion inevitably leaves hapless customers writing down their password and security questions on sticky notes or in a notebook, which entirely defeats the purpose of private “only you should know” passwords.

Courtney Love thought she could outwit the hackers with her own system, based on mnemonics.

“You use the lyrics to a song,” she said, for example, “ ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ — litswd-1 — and that way you can’t forget it.”

But the newspaper reports that worked until Love was tripped up by “Hey Jude.”

“I kept forgetting if it was ‘Hey Jude, don’t make it bad’ or ‘Hey Jude, don’t make it sad,’ ” she said. “So I gave up on that.”

But the most reviled security measure of all is the deadly, incomprehensible “captcha” code — the barely decipherable slanted text and numbers that real humans are supposed to be able to identify but spammers using automated tools cannot.

“Don’t you hate those?” Ullman said. “I always get those wrong because it looks like they were written by someone on LSD. It’s awful.”

The Communications Workers of America says when it comes to “stealthy” bills like S.B. 1611 that deregulate telecommunications in California, “no price is too high — no lie is too big.”

AT&T and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are back again fighting for more deregulation of California’s telecommunications industry with a bill that will strip oversight of vital telecommunications services and stop punishing bad actors that leave customers without telephone service, sometimes for weeks.

California legislators are typically not responsive to the wholesale deregulation efforts that seem to draw support in more conservative states, so AT&T’s lobbyists are trying a more “incremental” approach in the state. But AT&T has also inserted “stealth” language into the bill that would dismantle consumer protections, allow companies to abandon unprofitable landlines, and strip away important oversight “checks and balances” needed to ensure good service.

Sen. Padilla’s top corporate contributor is AT&T.

S.B. 1611 illustrates that AT&T can buy its way into any legislator’s office, Democrat or Republican. The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Alex Padilla (D-20th Senate District) has received more contributions from AT&T than from any other corporation in both the 2006 and 2010 elections.

The bill ostensibly claims to limit its scope narrowly to “Voice over Internet Protocol” (VoIP) and “Internet Protocol enabled service.” That brings to mind services like “digital phone service” from cable companies or alternative telephone services like Vonage, magicJack or Skype.

S.B. 1611:

The bill would prohibit any department, agency, commission, or political subdivision of the state from enacting, adopting, or enforcing any law, rule, regulation, ordinance, standard, order, or other provision having the force or effect of law, that regulates VoIP or other IP enabled service, unless required or delegated by federal law or expressly authorized by statute. The bill would specify certain areas of law that are expressly applicable to VoIP and IP enabled service providers. The bill would provide that its limitations upon the commission’s regulation of VoIP and IP enabled services do not affect the commission’s existing authority over non-VoIP and other non-IP enabled wireline or wireless service….

To the layperson who generally believes services like Skype and Vonage might not deserve the same oversight as AT&T, Frontier, or Verizon — which provide Californians traditional landline service, consider Section 2 (a)(2) of the bill, which describes and defines VoIP and IP enabled service as anything that:

“Permits a user generally to receive a call that originates on the public switched telephone network and to terminate a call to the public switched telephone network” and “any service, capability, functionality, or application using existing Internet Protocol, or any successor Internet Protocol, that enables an end user to send or receive a communication in existing Internet Protocol format, or any successor Internet Protocol format through a broadband connection, regardless of whether the communication is voice, data, or video.”

This “narrow” deregulation bill just grew as wide as the Gulf of Mexico and can realistically allow any phone company in California to ignore state oversight and regulation forever.

Traditional telephone companies increasingly utilize exactly these technologies for calls placed over ordinary landline phones. Using broadband service to engage in two-way communications also qualifies. With this kind of defining language, virtually every telecommunications service in the state of California would win near-total deregulation and walk away from important oversight. The California Public Utilities Commission certainly understood the implications of this bill when the majority of commissioners came out in opposition to S.B. 1611.

Goodbye Universal Service: S.B. 1611 Allows Phone Companies to Abandon Rural and Economically Distressed California Communities

Several public interest groups also discovered language in the bill that is a perennial favorite of AT&T — eliminating universal service requirements that assure every citizen that wants a telephone line can get one. S.B. 1611 lays waste to Section 709 of the California Code which guarantees: “our universal service commitment by assuring the continued affordability and widespread availability of high-quality telecommunications services to all Californians.”

With that language gone, the state’s phone companies can unilaterally decide to abandon the customers they no longer want to serve. That could spell disaster in rural northern and eastern California, and leave low income residents with nothing but a dead phone line, unable even to call 911 in an emergency.

One AT&T Lobbyist for Every California Lawmaker

The importance AT&T places on influencing lawmakers is readily apparent when one realizes there are at least 120 AT&T lobbyists working in the state capital Sacramento, one for every California lawmaker.

But when one considers the track record of California phone and cable companies in the last few years, is less oversight and regulation the right answer?

• Verizon Sued for Providing DSL Speeds (Suitable for VoIP) They Can’t Deliver
• AT&T Gouges California With 25% Rate Increase
• California Landline Nightmare: Residents in Bakersfield in Tears Over Lousy Service
• Southern California Power & Phone Companies Blamed for Devastating Wildfires
• Verizon Bills Dead People: We’ll Settle for Half Because She’s No Longer Among the Living
• Frontier’s Goodbye Kiss: A $680 Final Bill for a Departing Customer
• Calabasas Residents Annoyed by “Corrupt and Deceptive” Charter Cable; Time Warner Cable Also Called Out
• Time Warner Cable Guy Arrives Late to Service Call, Leaves Claiming Homeowner Had “Bad Air”
• More Frontier Problems: Californians Wait Months on Refunds for Disconnected Landlines
• The Many Challenges of Charter Cable: Rate Increases for Seniors, Bankruptcy, Employees Attacked, Customers Hassled
• AT&T’s California Gold Rush: Company Lobbyists Spread the Money Far and Wide

“SB 1161 is a stealth vehicle for the gradual deregulation of telecommunications in California,” the Consumer Federation of California declared on their website. “Consumers need the CPUC to have the power to investigate complaints of bad service or unfair charges on bills, regardless of the technology used to provide phone service.”

Call to Action!

Consumers across California need to get on board immediately to stop S.B. 1611. You can file online opposition courtesy of Free Press, but it is far more effective to also directly phone your own legislator and leave a message to urge this bill be defeated. It literally takes only 2-3 minutes to call and the money and phone service you could save will be your own. Use this district finder to contact your representatives.

S.B. 1161 is scheduled for hearing in the Assembly Appropriations Committee this Wednesday, so time is of the essence!

Despite perpetual claims of a wireless spectrum shortage, Verizon Wireless expects to have capacity to spare and has agreed to sell airwave licenses worth millions to T-Mobile USA if it can get federal regulators to approve a separate $3.6 billion acquisition of spectrum from some of America’s largest cable operators.

The deal will transfer surplus frequencies Verizon expects to acquire from its deal with Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, and other cable companies in return for undisclosed compensation from the German-owned carrier. In return, T-Mobile will also turn over some of its spectrum to Verizon, most likely to give both companies a larger pool of contiguous spectrum.

The frequencies involved are expected to be in the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) band (1700/2100MHz).

Wall Street analysts say the deal will remove T-Mobile from the list of concerns critical of Verizon Wireless’ deal with cable operators. It also may alleviate some criticism that Verizon is “hoarding” spectrum.