Posted by The Blogging Desk on Fri, Sep 24, 2010
Wall Street Journal:
Verizon Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg said Verizon Wireless's new data plans, which will likely roll out over the next four to six months, would be different from AT&T's plans, but he didn't provide details.
"We're not sure we agree yet with how they valued the data," he said at an investor conference Thursday.
If I were a Verizon subscriber, that last sentence would scare the pants off of me.
The cheaper, popular, ATT smartphone data plan is only $15/month for 200MB. Many iPhone users hover around that level either because they aren’t super nerds that browse the web all day on their enterprise network, or are near Wi-Fi while away from home. If you’re feeling fruity, there is the $25/month plan for anything under 2GB. I usually don’t get that high but I do come close. (Refreshing the Twitter is hard, painstaking work.) But that doesn’t matter as I was grandfathered in thanks to the now defunct unlimited data plan.
Verizon will be moving to a similar system, but if their CEO thinks ATT didn’t value their data appropriately, my guess is the Verizon alternatives will be more expensive. And why wouldn’t they price them higher?
I’m loathe to bring up the iPhone when taking about Verizon, but dammit, I’m going to do it right now. Let’s say that ATT no longer has exclusivity with the iPhone, and both carriers can sell it. Even better, as a super awesome managed services IT support company, that means we can support more folks. Who will the general public choose between ATT & Verizon for the iPhone; a carrier that has zero public history with dropping calls, or the one that has seemingly failed iPhone users for nearly 4 years?
I’d bet that the prospective iPhone owner wouldn’t care about paying an extra $5 or $10 a month for some peace of mind. And even if we’re just talking about someone looking for a smartphone in general, outside of the iPhone and the new Galaxy S phone, what does ATT even have to offer?
Verizon could charge $35 for 2GB of data and customers would still choose them over ATT.
Time to grab some VZW stock.
