AT&T this morning announced its own widely-anticipated pricing shift for its wireless phone customers, largely mimicking Verizon’s “Share Everything” plan and pricing, with minor differences.

AT&T’s Mobile Share plan, available in late August, emphasizes the fact families can now share a single data plan, but will also require customers to pay for unlimited voice and texting services. But unlike Verizon, current AT&T customers grandfathered on other plans can continue to keep their current plan, even after their next subsidized phone upgrade. AT&T also says it is not discontinuing existing individual and family plans.

While Verizon’s plan emphasizes the cost to add various devices on its “Share Everything” plan, AT&T asks customers to select a plan based on anticipated data usage. Customers can add up to 10 devices on an AT&T Mobile Share plan, one of which must be a traditional smartphone.

Like Verizon, AT&T is eliminating the extra-cost tethering option on its new plans. Tethering customers will now use their smartphone data plan allowance.

AT&T’s pricing is designed to appeal to bigger spenders.

“The larger the data bucket you choose, the less you pay per gigabyte and the less you pay for each smartphone added to the shared plan,” AT&T says in a news release.

Wall Street seems to approve.

“The ‘more you share, the more you save’ concept is one that will resonate well with customers because of the value provided through the Mobile Share data plans themselves and in smartphone connection fees,” said Roger Entner, Founder and Lead Analyst of Recon Analytics. “AT&T also is providing its customers with flexibility and choice by keeping its existing data plans and not requiring customers to move to Mobile Share unless they want to. It’s a win-win for both AT&T and its customers.”

But customers hoping to shop around will find little difference in pricing between Verizon Wireless and AT&T, who will charge nearly the same thing for each of their family share plans.

Verizon charges $40 for each smartphone, $30 for basic/feature phones, mobile broadband modems and wireless-equipped laptops cost $20, and each tablet adds an additional $10.

AT&T will charge a maximum of $45 for each smartphone, $30 for basic/feature phones, wireless modems and wireless-equipped laptops cost $20, and each tablet runs $10.

AT&T gives customers with a large appetite for data a break on the monthly equipment fee for smartphones. Choosing a basic 1GB data plan with AT&T means you will pay $40 for the data and $45 for each smartphone on the account. Upgrade to a 4GB shared usage allowance and AT&T lowers the monthly fee on smartphones to $35. If you select a data plan of 10GB or larger, the smartphone device fee drops to $30 a month for each phone.

The prices for data are similar between the two carriers on lower-end plans (AT&T’s overlimit fee will be $15/GB, the same Verizon charges now):

	VZW
	Data Plan	1GB	2GB	4GB	6GB	8GB	10GB	12GB	14GB	16GB	18GB	20GB
	Price	$50	$60	$70	$80	$90	$100	$110	$120	$130	$140	$150
	Smartphone fee	$40	$40	$40	$40	$40	$40	$40	$40	$40	$40	$40

	AT&T
	Data Plan	1GB	4GB	6GB	10GB	15GB	20GB
	Price	$40	$70	$90	$120	$160	$200
	Smartphone fee	$45	$40	$35	$30	$30	$30

Customers hanging onto long-grandfathered unlimited data plans tied with budget-priced voice minutes and texting allowances will probably want to take those plans to the grave, especially if they are using moderate amounts of data on each smartphone.

For those already caught in Verizon or AT&T’s usage pricing schemes, want unlimited voice and texting, and depend on the costly tethering add-on may find some savings, at least in the short term. But for average families with two smartphones and a basic phone for grandma, shopping around for a better deal with either Verizon or AT&T is pointless. With Verizon, those three phones with a 1GB data plan will run $160 a month — with AT&T, $160 a month. Upgrading to a 4GB usage allowance on both carriers also means an identical bill: $180 a month.

Cell phone customers of both carriers probably wish “competition” meant more than a race to see which would gouge customers with higher bills first. The other will surely follow, evidenced by today’s developments.

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam wants you to spend more with the phone company, and if his vision of Verizon’s future comes true, you will.

The company’s newest CEO spoke on a wide-ranging number of topics for the benefit of Wall Street investors at the Guggenheim Securities Symposium. A transcript of the event delivers several newsworthy revelations on the company’s future plans.

McAdam rose through the ranks of Verizon Communications with a specialty in the company’s immensely profitable wireless business. His predecessor, Ivan Seidenberg, spent his career at Verizon Communications working with the company’s legacy wireline (landline) network. While Seidenberg envisioned a new future for Verizon’s landline business with an upgraded fiber optic network called FiOS, McAdam maintained a different vision having run Verizon Wireless as a profit-making machine since 2006. McAdam believes Verizon’s future earnings and focus should be primarily on the wireless side of the business, because that is where there is serious money to be made.

“The first thing I did when Ivan sort of named me as the Chief Operating Officer was we had a very well-defined credo in the wireless side,” McAdam said. “We created it when we first came together in ’99 because we had seven different companies and we knew we had seven different cultures and we needed to tell people what it was we were really looking for. So we created that document. We spent a lot of time on it. We do a lot of reward and recognition as a result of it and that culture really took root in wireless.”

McAdam’s leadership also aggressively challenged the long-standing telephone company philosophy of earning a stable, predictable profit as Verizon did when it was a regulated monopoly. Instead, McAdam shifted the work culture towards an obsession with shareholder value.

“We took the top 2000 leaders through what we call ‘Leading for Shareholder Value’ and that was really a cultural shift for us because, if you think about it, the wireline side of the business has come out of the defined rate of return culture and we left that competitively a while ago. I am not sure we left it culturally,” McAdam said. “So we have been far more pushing why do you make that investment, what is the return on it, what is the priority of that investment versus another investment.”

Verizon’s Plans to Abandon Rural Landline Customers – Sign Up for Our Expensive LTE 4G Wireless Broadband With a 10GB Usage Cap Instead

Some of the most revealing commentary from McAdam came in response to questions about what Verizon plans to do with its enormous landline phone network, dominant in the northeastern United States.

In comments sure to alarm rural Verizon customers from Massachusetts to Virginia, McAdam clearly signaled the company is laying the groundwork to abandon its rural phone network (and DSL broadband) as soon as regulators allow. Dave Burstein at DSL Prime estimates that could impact as many as 18 million Verizon customers across the country.

“In […] areas that are more rural and more sparsely populated, we have got [a wireless 4G] LTE built that will handle all of those services and so we are going to cut the copper off there,” McAdam said. “We are going to do it over wireless. So I am going to be really shrinking the amount of copper we have out there and then I can focus the investment on that to improve the performance of it.”

Elsewhere, in more urban and suburban areas, McAdam also wants Verizon to purge its network of copper.

“The vision that I have is we are going into the copper plant areas and every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper,” McAdam said. “We are going to just take it out of service and we are going to move those services onto FiOS. We have got parallel networks in way too many places now, so that is a pot of gold in my view.”

In other words, McAdam would shift money spent maintaining and upgrading rural landline service into the company’s wireless network in rural America and its FiOS network in more urban environments, both of which will improve profits. FiOS allows Verizon to pitch television, broadband, and phone service in one profitable triple-play package, while also discontinuing standalone DSL service. Rural customers pushed to wireless LTE for broadband will face onerous usage limits and more expensive service for phone calls and broadband. Using Verizon’s LTE network for video would be prohibitively expensive.

McAdam hints the company has used its lobbyist force to make preparations to abandon rural customers first in Florida, Virginia, and Texas where state regulators approved legislation that eliminates the requirement Verizon serve as “the carrier of last resort.” That law required Verizon to deliver landline phone service to any customer in its service area on request. With that provision stricken in those three states, Verizon can abandon any landline customer it chooses after serving written notice.

McAdam said he intends to continue lobbying other states to adopt similar deregulation, and chided legislatures in both New York and New Jersey for “being backward” because they have repeatedly refused to allow Verizon to walk away from its rural customer obligations.

Burstein thinks the changes in progress at Verizon will be a disaster for affordable rural broadband.

“This makes a mockery of ‘affordable broadband,’ especially when Verizon and AT&T are boycotting the plan for discounts for poor schoolchildren,” Burstein says. “The detente between telcos and cable companies means the prices of modest Internet speeds (3-15 megabits down) are typically going up from $30-45 to $55-70.”

Burstein also notes the change spells disaster for competitors who sell DSL service over existing phone networks.

“Nationwide, alternatives to the telco/cablecos have less than 5% of the residential market but in some areas they remain important,” Burstein says. “The most interesting, Sonic.net in California, offers unlimited calls and Internet up to 20 meg for $50/month, 20-50% cheaper than AT&T.”

“High prices, unacceptable service choices and further rural depopulation are bad policy,” he adds.

Verizon still earns enormous revenue from its remaining landline customers, revenue McAdam hopes will be replaced by selling business-focused services instead.

“Cloud [service] is continuing to pick up for us. Security is I think going to be an even more important play for us as we go forward,” McAdam noted. “I think these large enterprise accounts, offering them kind of a global service with those up the stack […and…] applications on top of it drive it as well. So there is a number of pieces in the portfolio that I think will take us up and more than compensate for some of the falling off of copper-based services like DSL and voice and that sort of thing.”

Verizon’s Unionized Employees Are Wrong-Headed Defending Verizon’s Landline Network

McAdam also blamed the company’s unionized employees for remaining loyal to the company’s traditional role in the landline business.  Unions like the Communications Workers of America continue to push Verizon to expand its FiOS fiber optic network in more places, but the company has left its FiOS expansion on hold, diverting investment into its wireless business. Both McAdam and the union agree the days of copper wire networks are numbered, but McAdam hints that union concessions (and fewer unionized employees) are required before the company will again expand FiOS.

“Our employees see that it is not sustainable to keep having copper plant out there. You really can’t invest in it; it is difficult to maintain it; and they want to see us improve on FiOS,” McAdam said. “And when I am out in the field, the techs and the reps will be the first to point out kind of some of the dumb policies I call them that we have around the business. Well, a lot of those are based on rules that were negotiated with the union back in the ’60s and ’70s.”

“So we have to get the union leadership to understand that if the company is able to be more flexible in meeting customer needs then we can grow things like FiOS, which will provide good long-term jobs,” McAdam added. “Will it be the same number as what we had in the past? No.”

Verizon’s Enormous Offshore Bank Accounts: Waiting for a ‘Business-Friendly’ Administration to Let Them Bring the Money Back, Tax-Free

McAdam also signaled investors that the phone company’s profits massed in overseas bank accounts are going to remain in place until they know who wins the next election. Verizon wants to repatriate some of that offshore money, but they want to do it tax-free.

“Everybody is kind of waiting to see who controls the Senate and who controls the White House and they are waiting to make those — you have got to understand what the tax situation is going to look like, so we are all waiting to make those investments,” McAdam said.

‘Share Everything’ Lays the Foundation to Monetize Your Data Usage… Forever

McAdam is a big supporter of the company’s new Share Everything wireless plan, which charges smartphone owners $90 a month for unlimited voice calling, texting, and a small 1GB bucket of data that he is convinced customers will be prepared to spend more to enlarge.

“If I know that I have an intelligent home that I can get to any number of ways. If I know that I can do everything I want in my car that I can do in front of my TV set or my PC or on my tablet, I think it just takes away a lot of the restraints,” McAdam said. “Is it going to cost them more money? Yes, but it will probably shift their wallet spend from other things that they do individually into this sort of a bucket of gigabytes. And so I think it will be a significant [revenue] stream for us.”

FitchRatings, a credit ratings agency, agrees in a new report.

“The new pricing structure taken by the industry leader is a disciplined pricing action that could create more cash flow stability longer term within the wireless industry,” the credit ratings agency said last week.

Fitch notes data services are increasingly becoming a larger source of revenue for wireless phone companies. In the first quarter alone, data revenues at Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA — all carriers that abandoned flat rate wireless data plans, grew 19% year over to year to $14.2 billion. That represents 41 percent of the companies’ service revenues.

Despite assertions from Verizon that the new plans deliver convenience and better value for subscribers, Fitch found they actually represent a substantial price increase for many customers.

“These increases are sometimes material, depending on whether the legacy rate plans have low recurring charges for text messaging or calling minutes. As a result, prices have generally increased for new subscribers,” Fitch reports.

Fitch warns investors Verizon is likely to lose customers over its new pricing strategy, and experience a slowdown in new customer growth as well, at least until competing carriers realign their pricing and plans to be similar (or match) those Verizon introduced last month.

The Days of Your Subsidized Android/iPhone May Be Numbered

McAdam’s vision also includes a re-examination of device subsidies as customers increasingly depend on wireless devices. McAdam previously indicated the wireless device subsidy was designed to get customers to adopt and embrace new technologies, and as adoption rates have soared, the need to keep discounting technology that customers depend on diminishes.

He echoed that sentiment at the Guggenheim Securities Symposium, noting that Verizon this month abandoned subsidies on tablet devices. For McAdam, discounting wireless technology serves one purpose: to quickly establish a new business relationship with a customer that probably would not buy their first device at full price.

But McAdam recognizes changing the company’s subsidy that customers expect to receive must happen gradually. It has already started, first by eliminating early upgrade discounts, then by dropping the company’s loyalty discount “New Every Two” plan. Now, the company will only allow grandfathered unlimited data plan customers to keep those plans if they agree to forego any subsidy on their next smartphone.

“If you look at the telematics industry today [services like OnStar], the car companies subsidize a device that goes into the car. So I think that we have a tendency over the years to sort of look and say, oh, something is going to happen very quickly,” McAdam said. “Things have a tendency to evolve over a long period of time, so I think you will have some devices, like the tablet today, that [are] not subsidized and you’ll probably still have certain devices that are because you want to establish that relationship with a customer and that is the easiest way to get there.”

Verizon Wants You to Use the Cable Industry’s Growing Wi-Fi Network

McAdam’s vision also offloads as much of Verizon’s 3G and 4G traffic to other networks as possible. Ironically, one of the biggest networks he hopes customers will use instead of his are the growing number of Wi-Fi services offered by his competitors in the cable industry.

“It is interesting that a lot of people have said, well, I can’t believe you’re going to partner with [cable companies],” McAdam said. “You are not going to use their Wi-Fi are you? Well, of course, we are. I mean we want to shift as much onto FiOS or onto the fixed network where we can and then provide — use that capacity to provide those higher demand services like video.”

McAdam added he does not want customers sitting in their homes watching video over his LTE 4G network. He also wants that traffic shifted to Wi-Fi.

“So our thinking going forward as we talk about kind of the ‘One Verizon’ approach is we want to use every network asset we have and if that means jumping onto FiOS or using the cloud services for mobile as well as fixed line, using security across all of our different access technologies, we want that network to be seamless and that is what our CTO, Tony Melone, is driving hard on in the business right now,” McAdam said.

One preview of that thinking at work can be found on Verizon Wireless’ hottest new device — the Samsung Galaxy S3. Verizon’s version of the phone browbeats customers with prominent menus that encourage Wi-Fi use wherever possible. The phone’s persistent reminder has become a pest according to many of the phone’s owners, who consider both the message and the difficulty keeping Wi-Fi shut off obtrusive.

Verizon’s partnership with large cable companies including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, and Bright House Networks originally involved the acquisition of excess wireless spectrum cable companies originally intended to use to compete with the mobile phone industry. With the cable industry abandoning those plans, the proposed collaboration involving Verizon Wireless grew to include cross-marketing each other’s products and services, and now apparently includes sharing the cable companies’ growing Wi-Fi networks.

Verizon Believes The Future of Telecommunications Needs to Be In the Hands of Two Companies — Verizon and AT&T

A point of shared belief between market leaders Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is that excessive competition just does not make sense. Both believe federal regulators have it all wrong when they push to maintain the level of competition that still exists in the telecommunications business. When the Department of Justice effectively pulled the plug on a merger between AT&T and T-Mobile, Stephenson was outraged and, in one investor conference call, launched a tirade against regulators and suggested that AT&T would throw in the towel on expanding rural broadband in a retaliatory move.

McAdam and Stephenson both believe that competition in telecommunications represents wasted investment, inefficiency, and value destruction.

“I think the fundamental problem here, and it is sort of like fighting gravity I think, is that it is so expensive to build these networks that you are not going to support seven or eight carriers,” McAdam told investors. “I don’t — frankly, I think you’ll be lucky if you can support three in a healthy environment.”

But McAdam recognizes that if it achieves a wireless duopoly with AT&T, it must be a benevolent one, or else the marketplace abuses the wireless industry has a track record engaging in will invite regulatory scrutiny.

“We have a tendency to create a great club and hand it to our detractors and say please beat me with this because we do some dumb things like fighting some of the number portability and trying to push a direct wireless directory,” McAdam said. “I mean there are things that have really upset customers and that invites regulation. So I think the industry has the responsibility to act in the best interests of the customer as part of the mix with a shareholder, but I think there is always going to be the battle with regulation.”

McAdam admits he is uncomfortable with the fact the Obama Administration has allowed the regulation pendulum to swing more towards enforced competition and checking the power of dominant carriers in the marketplace. He prefers the Bush Administration’s “hands-off” approach that allowed both Verizon and AT&T to snap up smaller competitors with scant regulatory review.

McAdam believes the Obama Administration’s FCC and Justice Department is slowing down wireless investment, innovation, and the industry’s ability to earn profits at a time when unemployment in sky high and increased investment will help drive the economy forward.

West Virginia has returned to broadband mapping the old-fashioned way, with local volunteers fanning out across various areas of the Eastern Panhandle to get a true picture of what broadband service is like on the ground.

The Region 9 Planning and Development Council is helping coordinate the project, currently surveying residents in Berkeley, Jefferson, and Morgan counties. Residents and area businesses can complete a 22-question survey online or on paper, with copies available at most area public libraries.

The Council is trying to ascertain what specific neighborhoods still lack broadband service and also asks current broadband customers to rate the performance of their current provider — like Frontier Communications or a local cable operator. GIS analyst Matthew Mullenax told the Herald-Mail the survey gives a chance for customers to express their views about the speed of their connection, how reliable the service is, and how much it costs.

The West Virginia Broadband Deployment Council is effectively running a mapping “do-over,” to replace the highly-criticized broadband map originally drawn by Connect West Virginia, a state chapter of Connected Nation, that suggested 90-95% of the state had access to broadband when it was produced over three years ago.

Connected Nation has direct ties to some of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies, and despite its non-profit status, heavily lobbies legislators on broadband-related issues. The group largely relies on data voluntarily supplied by providers themselves, and critics accuse the group of doing little to verify the accuracy of that data. As a result, states are left with inaccurate, over-optimistic maps that suggest broadband availability is not a problem.

Broadband mapping projects can cost taxpayers millions, paid for by federal grants earmarked for mapping projects. But in communities like Paw Paw, W.V., the costs of not having broadband are just as high for local residents who find good-paying technology jobs largely unavailable in the community, which lacks adequate broadband service.

Mullenex hopes once an accurate map can be drawn, the state can create a strategic plan to push for broadband expansion in areas where service is lacking. The Council hopes its efforts will help pinpoint the areas of greatest need, and direct federal and state grant funding to improve broadband service for affected communities.

 

The West Virginia Broadband Deployment Council released this 2012 map. Areas marked in dark green have no broadband service of any kind, including wireless mobile broadband.

A series of severe thunderstorms accompanied by near-hurricane-force winds caused millions of customers in several Mid-Atlantic states to lose power and telecommunications services late Friday, and some are expected to remain without service until at least this coming weekend.

The storm, known as a “derecho,” uprooted trees, which in turn knocked down power lines and caused wind-related damage to buildings from Ohio to West Virginia, Virginia to Maryland, and even into North Carolina.

But the storm also is raising questions about the massive failures in commercial telecommunications systems that left entire 911 emergency response systems offline for days, wireless networks non-operational, cell phone systems overwhelmed, and broadband service, deemed a lower priority by emergency officials, down and offline.

Some of the biggest problems remain in and around the nation’s capital and in the states of West Virginia and Virginia, where inadequate infrastructure proved especially susceptible to the storm’s damaging winds.

D.C., Maryland, and northern Virginia

In northern Virginia, calls to 911 were met by silence over the weekend, thanks to a catastrophic failure of Verizon’s landline network. With primary lines down, Verizon’s backup 911 systems also failed, leaving millions with no access to emergency responders.

Fairfax County officials finally put the word out the best way to summon emergency help was to drive (through streets littered with debris and downed power lines) to the nearest fire or police station for assistance.

“It’s just not OK for the entire 911 system in the region to go down for the period of time that we were out, especially after an enormous emergency where people needed to make those calls the most,” Sharon Bulova, chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, told the Associated Press.

Verizon spokesman Harry Mitchell was left flat-footed, promising an investigation into Verizon’s latest 911 failure, and called the storm as damaging as a hurricane. He urged local officials to “move forward” beyond the immediate criticism and help make progress to get service restored.

Many emergency response networks also depend on telecommunications services, including fiber cables, to reach transmission towers for radio dispatch and mobile data terminals. In northern Virginia, the city of Alexandria has been managing to handle emergency dispatch services for several counties.

With power lines down, cable and phone lines often went as well. In those cases, electric utilities have first priority to restore service, and then cable and phone companies can begin repairs of their own.

Since cable operators rely on power companies to supply electricity to their amplifiers and other equipment, Comcast and Cox, which dominate the region, are blaming most of their outages on power disruptions, and promise service will be restored when the power returns.

Verizon’s DSL and FiOS broadband networks were both disrupted by the storm, primarily because of downed lines and power losses.Even wireless networks, which some might suspect would be immune to downed lines, were also seriously affected by the storm. Cell towers connect to the provider’s network through fiber optic and T1 lines, and although backup power generators can maintain a cell tower for days in some cases, backhaul line cuts can leave cell towers useless.

In metro D.C., call completion problems were a problem during the storm and sometime after as local residents turned to cell phones to communicate. Over the weekend, customers in and around Richmond, Va., found Verizon Wireless useless for text messages because of a service disruption. As backup generators ran dry of fuel, some cell towers that survived the initial storm have been shutting down until maintenance crews arrive and refuel.

The harshest criticism has so far escaped phone and cable companies. Instead, local officials and residents remain focused on Pepco, the power utility serving the Washington area. Pepco has learned from previous storms to become a master of lowered expectations, and is promising to do its best to restore power a week or more after the storm was a memory.

West Virginia and western Virginia

The state of West Virginia, and western rural Virginia state, have illustrated what happens when deteriorating infrastructure is asked to withstand winds of up to 100mph. Frontier’s operations in West Virginia were hit especially hard. Landline networks in that state had been allowed to deteriorate for years by former owner Verizon Communications. Frontier had its hands full trying to keep up with repairs, calling in additional staff and trying to maintain landline service in some areas with the help of generators.

That job was made much harder by a rash of generator thefts that impacted the phone company, and local authorities are still looking for those responsible. At least one-third of all central switching offices operated by Frontier in West Virginia remain on generator power as of yesterday. As of July 3, the company reported it has 12,000 repair requests still waiting for action.

It was a similar story in the western half of Virginia where independent phone companies and Verizon were faced with an enormous number of downed trees and power lines, many in rural areas. More than 108,000 Virginia residents are still without power as of this afternoon, and many will not see it restored until the weekend.

Because the derecho swept across a large area encompassing the entire state, it has been difficult for utility crews to respond from unaffected areas to assist in repairs because the damage was so widespread. Logistically, just coordinating repair operations has proved difficult because cell service has been spotty (or networks have been jammed with calls) in some of the worst-affected areas.

“Derechos are nothing to fool with, but still this was not the most serious storm Virginia has ever dealt with, and the impacts on our telecommunications networks seem to indicate they’ve been allowed to fall apart over the last several years,” shares Stop the Cap! reader Edward Klein, who lives near Roanoke. “I think an investigation is needed to make sure utilities are spending enough money to keep these networks in good shape so this kind of thing doesn’t happen everytime a storm sweeps through.”

Sally Medina is a Sacramento mom grandfathered with her daughter on an unlimited data plan, or so she thought.

When daughter Leticia started getting text messages from Verizon alerting her she used half of her data allowance for the month, the Medina family learned for the first time Verizon had quietly switched them away from their unlimited data plan to one with just a 2GB usage allowance.

The family suspects the change was made when Leticia upgraded to a new phone back in January, and did not realize it until slowly growing data use finally triggered the first usage alert from Verizon.

Medina is angry because Verizon pulled the rug out from their agreement to allow the family to keep unlimited data.

“This was the agreement. We did our part. I think they should follow through on theirs,” Medina told CBS Sacramento consumer reporter Kurtis Ming. “They told her it was going to be unlimited so she didn’t question it.”

Too late to fix it now, came the reply from Verizon Wireless, who refused to switch the family back to unlimited data.

“Selling data consumption is incredibly lucrative, especially since data consumption is expected to rise. People are getting more hungry for it. And also people will start using more data as the network speeds improve,” CNET senior editor Jessica Dolcourt told the consumer reporter.

Dolcourt added carriers have a vested interest kicking customers off unlimited data as quickly as possible so they can start earning the additional revenue that comes with more expensive tiered data plans.

Verizon today launched its biggest change yet with its new “Share Everything” plan. Consumer groups like Free Press agree it does represent a big change. Verizon used to charge $29.99 a month for unlimited data. As of today, it charges $50 for 1GB on its newest plan.

The company says existing customers grandfathered on unlimited data plans can keep them, but only if they do not upgrade their phones or are willing to pay the unsubsidized upgrade price, which can run as high as $600. Either way, Verizon Wireless will get paid.

In light of the media attention on the company, the Medina family ultimately won what they wanted — an apology from Verizon and a return to unlimited data for daughter Leticia. But even she will not escape choosing a different plan if she wants a discounted phone in the future.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KOVR Sacramento Verizon Sneaks Away Unlimited Data 6-27-12.mp4[/flv]

KOVR in Sacramento reports Verizon Wireless snuck away an unlimited data plan that one local customer was promised she could keep.  (2 minutes)