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| Pay As You Go: 1000 Megabytes ($1.99) = 1 Gigabyte ($1,000) |
Verizon wants charge you $2 for every megabyte on a Pay Per Use plan. However, if you committed to to the 2-5GB plans you will be paying $30 to $80. So beware if you are on the $1.99/MB plan and use 1000 megabytes or a Gigabyte you will be charged $1000. Someone in Verizon's accounting department clearly either doesn't understand the economics of pricing or byte and bits. Their tiered data plans charge .01 cent per megabyte which sounds expensive as well.
For example: I use about 2 GB per month on T-Mobile HSPA+ 4G and I pay $25 per month for unlimited data. That would be $30 per GB Verizon and $10 per GB after the plan allowance. However, if you don't have credit or pay as you go that would have cost me $2,000 at $2 per megabyte. Verizon is surely going to have some lawsuits from this scam if its not corrected soon.
Carriers are clearly losing momentum to consumers who are using WiFi only and not willing to pay for expensive 3G data plans. Also, these are the same carriers that are asking you to offload your data onto free WiFi because their networks are congested. It has become crystal clear to me that we will be using 4G and LTE in the coming decade as a last resort and not as the primary means for data access. Its not getting cheaper and the networks are getting worse about handling the traffic. I suspect that we will soon have wireless armageddon in 2012.
The only thing you can do as a consumer is to use your data plans sparingly, connect to WiFi and open hotspots whenever you have the opportunity.
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