Verizon has raised its phone upgrade fee to "cover increased cost" of providing a 4G LTE network, despite its latest earnings report showing decreases in wireless capital expenditures. Verizon later "clarified" that it was referring to "ongoing costs to maintain and enhance the network".
Additionally, Verizon Wireless customers with grandfathered-in unlimited data plans will be disconnected or forced to switch to a limited plan if they use more than 200 GB of data a month on average. The company stopped offering the unlimited data plans in 2011. During Verizon's previous purge, customers using more than 500 GB of data per month were targeted.
T-Mobile USA will stop selling its older and cheaper limited-data plans to postpaid customers, shifting entirely to its new "unlimited" data plans that impose bandwidth limits on video and tethering unless customers pay extra. To ease the transition, T-Mobile will offer bill credits of $10 a month to customers when they use less than 2GB per month.
T-Mobile began its shift to unlimited data plans in August with the introduction of T-Mobile One, which starts at $70 a month. While there are no data caps, customers have to pay a total of $95 a month to get high-definition video and mobile hotspot speeds of greater than 512kbps.
The carrier said in August that the unlimited plan would be "replacing all our rate plans," including its cheaper plans that cost $50 or $65 a month. Nonetheless, T-Mobile kept selling limited postpaid data plans to new customers for a few months, but yesterday CEO John Legere said that as of January 22, T-Mobile One will be the "only postpaid consumer plan we sell."
Updated: AT&T is raising the price of grandfathered unlimited plans again
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday January 11 2017, @01:43PM
A few weeks ago I finally found a way to move the needle on my data plan, which was to stream audio during my commute because I was temporarily caught up on podcasts and audiobooks.
I'm impressed at whoever streamed 500 gigs of ... something. I thought burning half a gig a week on music was excessive, but a thousand times that is quite impressive.
Streaming is VERY expensive.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @03:44PM
all that to unicast something to you as a stream, too.
i personally have had no problem keeping a small mp3 player with a memory card I've upgraded over the years... and hooking it into the car audio system in some way, which has changed over the years as well. my car at the moment has a USB connection and can read files right off a USB stick. provided I arrange the folder/files in a fashion the car radio system understands, I can get all the typical media tags displayed as usual.
I appreciate being able to stream music or to turn on the radio, but the costs involved to stream so much data when I've got copies of the same music sitting on memory chips and on disk drives and on cassettes and CDs and records and...
it has just seemed cheaper, if not as cool, to conserve my phone's battery life and just play music from local content. The content may be memory chip that contains all of the music I've ever had in my entire life with room to double it, but it still seems less inconvenient to maintain than paying a subscription fee to something and having to pay for an internet connection and data usage fees on top of that while allowing for my usage patterns to get tracked and resold when the old way of changing tracks didn't result in personalized marketing...
seems to be the future is too expensive. I guess in the future cars that drive themselves, no one will be allowed to bring mix tapes along because of business reasons. maybe they will blame terrorist viruses for not allowing content to be shared between people, but not mention that when your preferences are sold amongst business partners.