Verizon data plan

[CigarGuy]

Anybody know if Verizon is having a sale on their data plans in the near future? With the new "share everything" plan, I was hoping to see a promo like they have had in the past.

[PierBridge]

I wouldn't expect to see the Double Data promotion for a while, certainly not until after the holidays if at all....IMO.

[masoct3]

I highly doubt it. They made the share family plan to increase capital revenue. Not unless half the customers leave who are coming up to an end of contract situation.

[CigarGuy]

Sure was nice when I was a kid and didn't need this stuff. I have 4 phones on a family plan. One smart phone for me and 2 basic phones for the kids and one for my mother in-law. To upgrade to 2 smart phones for the kids, it's $40.00ea per month, my mother in-laws basic phone will go form $9.99 to $30.00 per month. That's without figuring out which data tier I want. I can get two Razr's for .01 each, with two year plan. BTW, before I get lectured on buying the "fancy" phones for my kids, they are in college and "they are apparently the only ones without them" My daughters phone is ready for an upgrade, sons update in April and MIL about a year. Any of you know of a better deal -(poor choice of word), without not doing it? Lot of unhappy people with what the "V" provider is doing!

[pushbutton]

Data is becoming big money for them and suspect you will not see much in the way of deals in the future. I have had unlimited for something like 6 years but now won't even let you renew that plan anymore. Since my phone is so beat up, am going to root it and try to get all I can out of them before it takes the big dump. Sure would be nice if they had some competition. Suppose that great coverage cost some money though......

[Dave S]

The Mrs. and I went to smart phones a little over a year ago. We upgraded our sons basic to a smart phone a few months back since he was going off to college. With the traveling he does for college and the benefit of having his own Wi-Fi hotspot the choice for the upgrade was a no brainer for us. Overall, changing his basic to a smart phone only increased our bill by $20/month which also increased our total GB available from 4 to 6 per month.

[CAMAN]

Pushbutton - From what I have understood you are still able to buy a phone yourself without losing your unlimited plan. Problem is if you are now on a 3G plan I don't believe you will be able to bump up to 4G without upgrading your contract.

So if you'd like to keep your plan and your current phone is at the end of its life, find a used phone online and set it up to your number.

[aanderud]

I was originally not stoked to have lost the unlimited data we had when we wanted to upgrade a couple of phones to newer models. However, after doing some analysis I'm actually a bigger fan of this. You pay for the data you use. It's probably the most 'fair' way to bill out the data (I have the ability to manage my bill by managing my data).

The new data plans are more of a "pay as you go" thing -- similar to 'prepaid' or whatnot. You get an alert saying you're at 90% of your monthly data allotement, you just turn it up to the next level for this month. There goes another 10 bucks! No more paying $30 per phone for "unlimited" data when most of the phones were using less than 500 megs anyway.

Pushbutton, the DO have competition -- AT&T and Spring and T-Mobile. LOL. They're better than their competition in both network speed AND network coverage, and that stuff doesn't come free.

If you want to pay less, all 3 of those vendors offer lesser service for less money. Number portability has been around for a decade now. What more 'competition' do you want then that?

[CAMAN]

They're better than their competition in both network speed AND network coverage, and that stuff doesn't come free.

Surprising how great there coverage is. I was in Park Rapids over the weekend, the last time I had been up there was Labor Day. Then it was 3G the entire drive up just out of the metro and maybe a patch of 4G in St Cloud, no 4G anywhere else. This time I had 4G the entire drive up, and everywhere I went. It's amazing how quickly they can update the towers, and you're right that doesn't come cheap. It was super fast also.

[Scott K]

I have ATT, and will tell you, they have decent coverage, their 3g network is much faster then Verizons 3g network, but not as fast as Verizons 4g. Att will have the entire metro updated to actual 4g before the new year, and they are working on the rest of outer areas this next year. I will have 4g in my small southern out of the metro town in May, and I will also have 4g at my cabin in September.

Att has good coverage, but they are behind the times in 4g, but they are finally catching up in that area. But like I said, their 3g coverage is much faster then Verizons 3g coverage, but not as fast as their 4g, but by the sounds of it, they will have all of their towers updated in MN/WI areas, by the end of 2013.

ATT, also has the option to switch to the shared data plan, it isnt all that bad, I went from having 4 smart phones on my contract, and sharing 1400 minutes a month, unlimited text, and each phone having their own data plan, to unlimited minutes, unlimited text, and sharing 8 gig a month, and shaved off $30 a month off of my bill.

[upnorth]

AT&T vs Verizon coverage depends on where you are at. Up here I had a Verizon phone from work and had to have it switched to AT&T cuz off the main hwys it sucked so bad I couldn't use. AT&T is much better around here. But again you go to some other spots and not so much.

As far as plans go, I wouldn't expect to see deals like unlimited data coming from any of the big players anymore, they have us hooked and don't need to attract business anymore, they already have it.

[LwnmwnMan2]

Push-

You can buy whatever phone you want from the secondary market and keep your unlimited data.

I personally use 6-8 gb and my wife uses 3-4 gb/ month so we need to stay unlimited.

The 3 basic phones we have on our account are what REALLY increases the rates if we switch plans.

[pushbutton]

Yeah, have survived without 4g for this long and will give that a go for awhile. You just get so spoiled though.....have it on this wireless internet dohicky thing and it sure is nice.

[PierBridge]

So Verizon's 4G is faster than ATT's 3G? ... WOW thats great news .....

[Scott K]

So Verizon's 4G is faster than ATT's 3G? ... WOW thats great news .....

Well, being that ATT has been trying to deceive people by naming their new 3g network, "4g" now, because it is a better network then Verizons 3g, I just wanted to point out that ATT will have true 4g throughout the metro by the new year, and have pretty much all of their towers be 4g updated by the end of 2013.

I have noticed that the Northern Metro, and down town areas, have some actual 4g coverage now on ATT.

[DTro]

I wouldn't get too hung up on unlimited data, anything more than a couple gigs a month is the exception, not the norm. Im a heavy user and rarely go over a gig, especially when mixing in wifi

[Kyhl]

For point of reference, I let my data fly without wifi last month just to see what would happen.

Used 6.1G (unlimited plan) while forcing it to 3g most of the day. I stream 320k mp3s throughout the day from my google play account.

Went back to stealing using wifi from my employer this month. That will get me back under 2G this month.

[DTro]

Yikes, i guess there is a big difference between browsing websites and social media all day and streaming audio or video.

[delcecchi]

I don't know what the streaming audio sites use, but MP3 at 128kb is about a MB per minute or half a gigabyte per 8 hour shift.

[aanderud]

I don't know what the streaming audio sites use, but MP3 at 128kb is about a MB per minute or half a gigabyte per 8 hour shift.

I like the idea of streaming, and I've had unlimited data up until 2 weeks ago and didn't have a problem with it. But, now that I'm on a more limited plan it's not feasible to just let it rip wifi-free any more.

Luckily, my employer has a liberal policy relative to personal use of internet, so I am able to hook up wifi there and when i'm home of course.

I think with all of the limited data plans out, Google is going to have to figure out how to offer some type of low-fi quality option on their streaming. There's no reason they couldn't offer a 64 kbps or even a 32 kbps option. I'm pretty sure that in 32 kbps you can get FM-Radio-Quality music easily enough (which would be plenty for me).

Also, I noticed that they don't offer any place to tweak the size for the local cache (to keep songs that have been recently played, so you don't have to stream them next time). Seems like an obvious place to tweak. For instance if you have a 32 gig SD card you could set the cache size larger than someone who was using an 8 gig SD card.

Heck even doing things that seem obvious like peemptively copying any music that you have added to your google play account recently over to your phone when it's on wifi would save a ton. Odds are if you added music XYZ to your google play library, you're probably going to want to play it. Might as well just grab it when it's on wifi, and delete the least-recently played song out of the local cache if the cache is full.

While this type of stuff seems obvious to me, I'm not going to hold my breath with google. They are a dichotomy of sorts -- coming up with the best stuff in one arena, then totally failing to get common-sense stuff in others.

[MN Mike]

For those considering cell cards for their primary internet source I'll throw out a word of caution. I've got 2 customers that have been using a cell cards ( Verizon ) for their primary source because they have no access to DSL or Cable and satellite is unacceptable.

One uses theirs for the normal items and they are by no means heavy users but they do use a hosted Microsoft CRM solution. The other looks up parts and parts diagrams along with email, not a lot of extra surfing there either.

Up until a month ago or so, they would run up to their 10 GB / Month plan they purchased thru Verizon, this was on 3G.

Our tower was upgrade to 4G and in 10 days they blew thru their 10GB plan. Having to use the system for business, they continued on. The last I looked they were both pushing somewhere between 50 to 60 GB of usage for this past month!

Nothing changed, Verizon ' investigated ' one of them so far and said all charges were valid and the other is still in the process.

Verizon said that 4G process's that data so much faster it creates more traffic..... BUT THAT MUCH MORE!?

SO, for the mean time, I've installed 3G modems.

Needless to say, we will have to come up with a different plan!

Mike

[pushbutton]

They "got" me too. Used to go through about 5, but now nearing my 10 with a week left. Any techies back here care to explain how I am not being ripped off?

[aanderud]

Up until a month ago or so, they would run up to their 10 GB / Month plan they purchased thru Verizon, this was on 3G.

Our tower was upgrade to 4G and in 10 days they blew thru their 10GB plan.

...

Verizon said that 4G process's that data so much faster it creates more traffic..... BUT THAT MUCH MORE!?

[MN Mike]

I'm not saying these business-type customer were using netflix necessarily, but I'm just saying some software is tailored to probe the network and use as much as possible. Perhaps they're running some application that is similar in this respect.

I know what you're saying..... Microsoft CRM wouldn't do such a thing??? Would they???

I know the other one that uses it for parts lookup is a an obvious one, they've got 10 - 12 systems behind the Verizon plan, we use a Cradlepoint router to feed internet access to all of the stations but it's just nuts that it can jump just like that with an upgrade to 4G when they haven't changed their internet habits one bit.

Oh well...... just another problem to concur.

Mike

[LwnmwnMan2]

I stream Pandora or a couple of different radio stations 8-10 hours / day, about 25 days / month. That's where I end up at the 8-10 gb / month on my phone alone.

The 64 or 32kb would NOT sound like FM radio, IMO. It sounds like a strong AM radio signal when you're listening with quality headphones with apps with decent EQs.