Again, it seems like you and others are thinking only about your personal situations while discussing the business plan of a company that serves 90,000,000 customers. That doesn't make sense.
It makes PERFECT sense... I am certainly considering my personal situation but even more so, I REALLY AM CONSIDERING THE OTHER XX,XXXX Verizon customers. I'm recalling a statistic that I can't find right now but it went something like the top x percent of data consumers were consuming yy percent of the data. x being a number like 5 and yy being a number like 35 or something like that. The point is -- there are only a handfull of customers that are using a LARGE amount of data.
The same usage patterns exist on other carriers as well. This is what spawned the throttling of unlimited data that had sprint or ATT customers (whoever it was) all up in arms about being throttled on their "unlimited" data.
I would venture a guess that some graph/chart/statistic that Verizon owns shows that data consumption is going up... rapidly.
Considering the above couple of points, the changes reflected in the plans make perfect sense. I'm not saying I agree with them or disagree with them. I'm just saying that from a business perspective, they make sense. Trust me, we're a niche group. The fact that we're on the internet chatting about all of this immediately makes us a minority. Most people don't know and don't care. Verizon isn't going to alienate (or "piss off") the majority of their customer base. They're not dumb. It's my thought that they likely know exactly how many people are going to be directly adn negatively impacted by the change. My second thought is that they are willing to take that risk and the only way they'd be willing to do that is if that were a small small portion of their entire customer base.
Yes, with your current usage (which is extremely minimal) you should be on a capped/shared data plan and save money. But for people that use smartphones for media and "smart" activities rather than just calling/texting/and checking email twice a day, unlimited is the best thing ever.
Again, it seems neither of us have hard stats to back our thoughts but I would fall back on the prospect that the majority of the 90,000 (or whatever the number is) customer base has data consumption habits closer to my situation rather than yours. Considering the small niche that is the Macrumors crowd, I would say you're more likely to find people with consumption habits matching yours versus mine (here on macrumors). I don't think every single verizon customer is an active participant on Macrumors.
Heck, I have N.O.V.A. 3 installed on my phone and when they decide to fix a few bugs or change the UI and they push out an update that is 1,700mb that I use on Verizon's LTE network! If i had to make sure I was at a wifi spot everytime i wanted to update my apps, use skype, watch netflix, or listen to Pandora, that would be annoying. It restricts the freedom that cell phones are supposed to give you.
This is EXACTLY why Verizon is doing what they're doing! More data being pushed = more taxing on their system != their problem/fault! They're putting the ball back in the court of the consumer so to speak. Instead of carelessly downloading a 1.6 GB update, they're forcing consumers to THINK before consuming that much data. Sure, you can still do it... but you gotta pay! I don't see a problem with this. Updates used to be small and less taxing. There used to be way less apps that needed updates. There used to be way less smartphones on the market. I'm sure if Verizons infrastructure were able to freely grow at the same rate as smartphone/data adoption/consumption with no extra cost to Verizon, we probably would CONTINUE to see the same type of data plans.
because there are more users where there used to be less and the infrastructure is growing at a much slower rate than the rate of people jumping to smartphones -- something's gotta give. It's almost as simple as basic supply and demand.
So yes, YOU should not have been paying $50 a month so that your wife can check her living social app and facebook app once a day (at least what my wife does
. But not everyone uses their phones like you or your wife and some people actually get an AMAZING value from paying $50/mo for unlimited data.
Neither of us have Facebook on our phones and she obviously doesn't check any social-networking type apps (or I'm sure her data consumption would be much greater). I use my phone quite a bit even without facebook (I do have other social-networking apps). I keep our settings conservative on our respective devices. If others choose to not do that, that's on THEM...
by the way... I'm not picking on you or trying to start any kind of e-war... I'm trying to have a discussion on a topic that I feel is very misunderstood by the average consumer.
