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Speaking at an investors conference, Verizon’s CTO Fran Shammo revealed that the long rumored “shared data family plans” will be made available to Verizon Wireless customers sometime in the middle of the year. Apparently, the carrier has spent a full year getting everything up and ready on their end. According to Shammo, the new plan wont include everyone at first with the carrier focusing on “long-term migration.” Instead, their new plans will be to made available for current 4G data subscribers initially.
He also revealed that while Verizon is quick to advertise their blazing fast 4G LTE network in just about every television ad, realistically, only about 5% of their customers are actually using it. Verizon has long been trying to move their customers and adopt 4G with discounted handset incentives, promotions and marketing blitz. Verizon will continue rolling out their 4G network with plans to cover there entire 3G markets with 4G by 2013.
This news will most likely be music to many a Verizon customers’ ears. Shared data with single account billing could prove much more affordable if done right and echoes competing carrier Sprint, who has offered unlimited shared data family plans for years now. Still, it makes you wonder, with only 5% of customers currently using 4G LTE, how will their network hold up with 40 or 50% of customers using up all that bandwidth?
Not giving up my grandfathered unlimited plan .
Ditto!
Oh and according to the AT&T case just won “unlimited” means “unlimited”.
Same here.
Amen! And we have two Verizon smart phones at home.
If they are able to do this with the Grandfathered unlimited plan, and put in feature phones data as well, then great.
I hear ya! If they can do that at a reasonable price, I’m in.
Don’t see that happening, they might lower the minute plans, but hike up the add ons.
One can dream…..
I’ll be curious to see what pricing ends up at. It’s going to be tough to convince me to give up unlimited data.
Yep, both my wife and I are on unlimited with 4G. Monthly cost sucks and we don’t use a ton. If this would bring it down, I’m all on it.
Sure, I’d love to switch to Verizon, pay a higher bill and share a 2GB cap between three android phones. Pffft.
Also .I’ve heard that LTE is a battery hog, that probably explains the low usage, Verizon 3g is plenty fast for typical use.
4G in general whether it’s LTE or WiMAX, etc.. rips the battery apart. That’s just what it is. Like it or leave it.
Just cuz you from the stream, doesn’t mean you can talk to him like that
please. try using a phone made in the last 6 months. They don’t die from LTE like the previous gen of phones did.
haha my thoughts exactly.
I have the Droid Razr and it last about 5 1/2 hours on LTE it depends on if you take care of the battery in the very beginning or not i drained my battery completely then charged my phone completely before I turned it back on. In my opinion the newer phones will get better with the battery life being one of Android users biggest concerns …
no issues with my rezound.
not sure where you heard that from. Oh that’s right the internet, and you believe old news on the internet. I’m sure 95% of the people they claim aren’t using 4G are doing it simply because they heard the battery life sucks. Yeah that’s plausible. WRONG. The reason is because most of those people are Apple sheep where the iphone4s on down does not have 4G. END OF STORY.
4G is better for “typical use”. You get in and out of sites and apps faster and get on with your day.
The train addition is so low is that most people are stuck in their contracts still on a 3G device. Don’t forget the feature phones either.
Family data plans have the potential to be a great thing for families. But since Verizon has not released the pricing or details, its is impossible to determine how helpful it will be. Its generally a good thing that they are perusing it.
I would love to be able to grandfather my unlimited data to the other phones on my plan, but hell would freeze over before Verizon ever did that.
Seems like a great idea, seeing how I average 500 MB/month and Verizon’s lowest ‘tier’ is 2 GB. So that could potentially be shared across 2-3 phones without the risk of going over.
A customer service rep told me that the people that are grandfathered in use less data. New customers go through data like it’s water.
Pshhh I waste like 3gb a month, I will not surrender my unlimited data. Unless of course Verizon pricess the data sharing rates at a reasonable price. Like 3gb at 30 bucks a month or something along those lines.
please put me in the front of the line, with 2 tablets and 2 DROIDS, it’s win win for me.
Not giving up my grandfathered plan
Verizon Wireless Should Have Shared Data Family Plans Available By The Middle Of This Year read more m a k e ca s h 4 . c o m