iPhone News Updated

Verizon to offer $30 unlimited data plan for iPhone

Verizon to offer $30 unlimited data plan for iPhone

Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) poured some gas onto the iPhone fire when it announced Tuesday that it would offer the same $30 unlimited data plan for the iPhone as it offers for all of its other smartphones.

AT&T (T, Fortune 500) uses a metered system that makes its smartphone customers pay for the amount of data they consume.

In June, the company slashed the starting prices of its data plans, but also added caps to them and eliminated its unlimited plan. AT&T customers now pay $15 a month for 250 megabytes of monthly data, or $25 for 2 gigabytes and an additional $10 for each gigabyte of monthly data usage that exceeds the allotted 2 GB limit.

So even though the cheapest available monthly iPhone voice plus data plan on AT&T is $54.99, compared to $69.99 on Verizon, customers that download 2.1 GB of data on their iPhones will pay $69.99 if they have Verizon — compared to $74.99 on AT&T.

That’s not so hard to do: If you want to watch Netflix (NFLX) on your iPhone using a mobile connection, 2 GB only gets you between six and 12 hours of streaming movies and TV shows, depending on the bit rate.

When it unveiled its iPhone earlier this month, Verizon Wireless declined to discuss the phone’s data plan pricing. There fueled speculation that Verizon would go the way of AT&T and introduce a tiered plan, ditching the all-you-can-eat option.

But the company has apparently decided that would be a competitive mistake.

“I’m not going to shoot myself in the foot,” Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s chief operating officer, told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. He said that moving towards a tired data plan would reduce the number of iPhone customers that would defect from rival AT&T.

AT&T has been pounded for years about its network struggles, which recently got it crowned “worst carrier” in America in a Consumer Reports survey. The company’s 20 million iPhone customers are often its most vocally unhappy customers.

Still, only about 2.5 million customers are expected to defect to Verizon next month, according to numerous analyst estimates, thanks in large part to the high early termination costs that AT&T built into its contracts.

The iPhone will be available to Verizon customers for pre-sale Feb. 3 and it will appear in stores on Feb. 10.

[Thanks: http://money.cnn.com]

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