Verizon plans purge of 200GB+ bandwidth hogging unlimited data users
Verizon Wireless will force unlimited data subscribers who use over 200 gigabytes of bandwidth per month to change their plan to one with a data cap, or face having their wireless service disconnected.
Employees were recently advised of the policy change, which targets customers managing to average more than 200 gigabytes of usage on a single line "over several months." Affected customers are being sent notices of their excessive usage, with a deadline of Feb. 16 to change their plan.
If a line is disconnected under the new policy, customers will have a 50-day window to resubscribe, though only to plans without unlimited data. The highest-capacity plan Verizon lists on its website offers $100 gigabytes of data per month for $450, with line access fees of between $5 and $20 per connected device.
This is not the first time Verizon has performed a purge of its heaviest users. In July of last year, the carrier encouraged high-bandwidth users to make a similar price plan change, at the time targeting customers using "well in excess" of 100 gigabytes on a single device.
Carriers have spent a number of years slowly migrating its customers away from unlimited data plans in favor of capped services, partly due to the high resource consumption affecting other lower-usage customers. Users with grandfathered unlimited data plans sometimes abuse the service by using it as their sole Internet connection, tethering computers and streaming set-top boxes in their home instead of using broadband.
Employees were recently advised of the policy change, which targets customers managing to average more than 200 gigabytes of usage on a single line "over several months." Affected customers are being sent notices of their excessive usage, with a deadline of Feb. 16 to change their plan.
If a line is disconnected under the new policy, customers will have a 50-day window to resubscribe, though only to plans without unlimited data. The highest-capacity plan Verizon lists on its website offers $100 gigabytes of data per month for $450, with line access fees of between $5 and $20 per connected device.
This is not the first time Verizon has performed a purge of its heaviest users. In July of last year, the carrier encouraged high-bandwidth users to make a similar price plan change, at the time targeting customers using "well in excess" of 100 gigabytes on a single device.
Carriers have spent a number of years slowly migrating its customers away from unlimited data plans in favor of capped services, partly due to the high resource consumption affecting other lower-usage customers. Users with grandfathered unlimited data plans sometimes abuse the service by using it as their sole Internet connection, tethering computers and streaming set-top boxes in their home instead of using broadband.
Comments
People just like to watch video on wireless it seems...have a friend who had unlimited and watched video all day long just because he could. With all the WiFi around I just do not see the need for all that bandwidth over the carriers network. Unlimited is unlimited and Verizon should have to honor existing contracts. I thought at one time they wouldn't upgrade the phone without a new contract with data caps.
Otherwise, in a future 1000Gb/s network speeds, they could run a large company through their phone plan and make service suck for everyone around them (especially if two or more are in the vicinity).
Perhaps someone from Australia can comment on how their truth in advertising laws affect this. I'll bet carriers are more honest there.
As far as using 200GB per month, my partner and I use way more than 200GB/month with our home internet connection through Spectrum (Time Warner). This is with us not even being home all day. We do a lot of streaming of things like Twitch, YouTube, etc...those are all things that uses massive amounts of data. So if this is your only way of getting on the internet then if you do lots of streaming it is possible to use a lot of data really without doing much. Last month we used nearly 300GB of data.
What Verizon is trying to do is force these customers who have been able to hold on to their unlimited data plans to something else. They cannot stand that these customers can just use as much data as they feel like.
I still think Verizon and all of the other carriers are just absolutely screwing customers with these data caps, overages, etc. They're nickel and diming everyone and getting away with it. Verizon is still a POS of a company for charging customers now $30 to upgrade their phones. This is $30 of pure profit and they're getting away with it. Unfortunately, where I live you pretty much have to use Verizon or else you don't get shit for service.
Instead of thinking these heavy data customers are fucking others over...more like carriers refuse to upgrade their equipment to handle the load. Its no different from Comcast, Spectrum, etc. So is it really the customers fault or are the carriers trying to make it sound like its the customers fault so they can get away with riding the money train with what they have and only doing incremental upgrades?
My mother in law has no internet at home and hits about 15GB of data on her phone by watching TV on her phone. If SHE can hit 15, I can see many hitting 100, but not 200
Verizon just keep the unlimited plan for those people never left or converted.
Current Verizon wireless plan has only up to 30GB.
For those unlimited plan holder customer getting 100GB sounds not that bad.
Used to be that unlimited plan cost was $30 then now paying $59.99.
Current price for $70, you can only getting 8GB+2GB.
Stop complaining.. You still have so called unlimited(but cap on 100GB) plan.
If you don't like then go to T-mobile or Sprint. They are much cheaper and unlimited.
Oh.. T-mobile site shows unlimited plan - during congestion the top 3% of data users (>28GB/mo.) may notice reduced speeds until next bill cycle.
Still, unlimited is unlimited but some do abuse it for the sake of abusing it.
My wife was driving our out-of-state nieces home one day when I got an alert from Verizon that we were approaching our data limit. We were scratching our heads as to how that happened and realized that she had let them tether their iPads to her iPhone while driving and one of them was streaming video. She had consumed nearly 2 GBs and they were barely out of town.
On the one hand, very impressive that Verizon delivered that data speed along a rural interstate highway. On the other hand, yikes!, that's a LOT of data getting consumed in a very short amount of time!