Basically all carriers are begining to put limits. The issue is complex, but it's NOT driven only by $$. The main issue has to do w/ available bandwidth (and how service degrades as you load the systems w/ more and more traffic) and now that people have like a zillion devices making connections to the Internet, the capacity to add new customers (which in important for business to stay afloat) is limited, so it appears that the new business model is to restrict your allowance so they can add customers.
Here is something I found out today and took me my HUGE surprise. I found out that my AT&T DSL account has a 150GB allowance limit. That was news to me and I think it was a fairly recent change (perhaps in the last year or so). So yeah, the good all days of unlimited data plans may be over, or more costly (at least till they figure out how to modify transmission technology to handle the evergrowing consumer demands).
Wow--complicated??? You have to be a Verizon employee. It's quite simple, take a good portion of the millions they are raking in on a daily basis and start investing in their backbones, and towers. The simple fact is that they know everything is going mobile and want to charge for every tiny drop of data. At some point the FCC needs to wake up and do some thing. Noting keeps innovation and progress down like all these data caps. Imagine what you could do with 4g and an unlimited data plan. Verizon looked at that and said, WOW that's cool but we are not making nearly enough if we let them do that.
Pandora, skype, SomaFM, Hulu etc (this list could go on for a long time) all rely on large amnts of data. So now what? You have this phone and it will do so much, then verizon wants you to do it on someone else's network. They are protecting their own cable company. Not helping consumers. FCC ARE YOU READING this????
And this discussion is from LAST YEAR! Things have changed since then.
I'm most definitely NOT a VZW employee. If a post answered your question, please mark it as the answer.
I don't think things have changed too much in the last year on this. The points in the first posting are dead on. I think about the only thing that might have changed in the last year on this would be, Verizon used to make a lot of money on services like Apps, and VZ Navigator and now with the huge Android market out there where the phone has Navigation for free on it so Verizon is losing 9.99 per person per month that used to subscribe, and now says, I have Navigation free so why should pay for it. The same with tethering. Verizon went to a lot of trouble to have the tethering capability blocked on Androids so they could charge a fee for it, yet there are quite a few apps out there for free or .99 cents that let you do it without paying Verizon. Verizon also used to have a tight cap on ringtones back in the day of the basic phone where you had to buy them directly from Verizon. They also went to a lot of trouble to block methods of installing your own ringtones on your old phone. Now with androids, you can put whatever you want on it. A lot of people cannot understand why they try to lock everything out on these phones and the only sensible reason I can come up with is that they are losing money so if they block your access, you have to buy the service from them.
The fact is the 4G network is being built quite a bit beefier then the 3G network was built so it will allow more users on the network using the unlimited data. Also with 4G the data moves so much faster, that users are on the network using data for a shorter period of time in effect freeing up the network for other users to access it. Another fact is Not everyone has or will have 4g and a lot of people will continue to use the 3g infrastructure for data which means that in theory users of the 3g network will be able to get a larger bit of the network since fewer users will be on it.
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