I currently have a Verizon Wireless share everything family account with 8G of data per month. Last month we used about 7.9G. Yesterday I got a call from Verizon offering to change to a 10G plan. I said I monitor the data and don’t need to upgrade. Then he told me that changing plans would actually be $10 cheaper per month, maintaining my unlimited voice and text plan. So I took it.
Why would they call me unsolicited to give me more data for less money?
It keeps you locked in a contract. Or, from a slightly less cynical perspective, it keeps you happy and heads off any discontentment (and desire to shop around for another plan) if you were to have overage charges in the future. If they have spare network capacity near you it costs them nothing. Even if the network is near capacity, giving you more data to use just slightly increases their need to upgrade capacity.
Are you sure about the numbers? Was it “$10 cheaper if you go over 8GB into the 8.001-10GB tier next month?”
I run 250MB, shared and Mrs B and I only turn on mobile data when we need it because we can rely on wifi about 99% of the time. Whenever I get close to that limit, the flood of offers starts. I think I pay $15 for that data tier. If I were to use the next tier’s allotment, it would cost me double the monthly upcharge… that is, I can pay for 500MB at $25 or get it in overage chunks for $30 or so. So I’d be “saving” $5 or $10 by signing up for the higher tier… but losing money because our data usage is typically around 100-150MB a month.
Ninja: Verizon allows changes without contract extension. It might be for some combination of the reasons mentioned, but I’d first have to hear what the real numbers are, per my above.
Because competition. T-Mobile and other players have aggressively been promoting higher data limits with less expensive rate plans. For some reason, you have been flagged by VZW as a “high churn risk” customer, so they proactively reach out to you, sweetening their deal with you before you begin to shop around.
Even though it seems from your post that you weren’t actively looking for a better deal or to change carriers, something flagged you to VZW. It’s MUCH cheaper for VZW to cut you a deal to retain you than it is for them to acquire a new customer to take your place if you were to leave.
like lazybratsche said, what you really did was re-up your contract for another 2 years (or however long), so they locked down that revenue for a longer period of time. Where you getting close to the end of your last contract? That probably motivated the call more than your data usage.
He told me I was currently paying $90, which I confirmed is the correct base rate, and the new plan would be $80. Neither rate takes into account potential overages. Actually my 16-year-old son is the data hog and I was going to flog him into using less so I could reduce the data plan; now it won’t be necessary.
I would say that leftfield6 got it. Competition has made Verizon recently offer more data and they would rather offer that to you at $10/month cheaper then lose you. They may or may have not extended your contract.
Maybe, but I know they will also extend contracts, or start anew, after ambiguous discussions of certain changes, and then claim to have been acting on the customer’s instruction. I strongly suggest that the OP and others in similar situation review their next statements very carefully.
Former Verizon Customer
He told me that the change in rate would not change the length of the contract. I asked him twice to make sure I understood what he was saying.
They are being nice to you so that they can show the FCC and FTC that they treat there customers fairly. They need to do so that they can be in a better position come next year when the FCC auctions off part of the bandwidth spectrum. They recently got into a lot of hot water with both the FTC and FCC for trying to unilaterally renege on agreements they made with customers that have grandfathered unlimited data plans (like me). They had been accused of bait and switch tactics and it was made clear in public statements from the FCC that Verizon would not be viewed favorably in the upcoming auction if they followed thru on their threats to take away unlimited data plans from existing customers.
Okay. Then you either were adjusted to a newer plan base out of niceness, or hooked into a contract extension out of verizonness.
Here, there isn’t much choice. Only one provider works well all over the territory and the rest have huge dead spots and slow data zones. We’d probably have no good coverage (Sprint had a half bar upstairs in my house; AT&T was worse) if Verizon had not partnered with our town safety services. They use Big V as their redundant comm loop, so it’s got very solid coverage in all but the deepest cracks. Point being, it’s Verizon or nothing here (and you can pay for that nothing if you like).
I recently added a data line to my plan, and the store rep could not believe that 4 lines would only need 2 GB - he was trying to sign us up for 4 or 6. I held firm on 2 GB.
About a week later, I got a text from VZW offering to raise my data limit from 2 to 4 GB because I was a “loyal customer”. I doubted it, but chatting online with a VZW rep confirmed that there was not extra charge for the extra capacity. It may have extended my obligation to them, but since I had just gotten the new line, it was no big deal to me.
It hurts me to pay so much for 4 lines of service, but my family is spread out and so far VZW is the best balance of coverage, hardware cost and overall price. This may change as my kids leave the nest permanently…
A long time back, wise if wacky man said that “a long distance call is a costless byproduct of the telephone system.” I’m not sure if he’s still in the game, but that law could be updated to “data traffic is a costless byproduct of the mobile telephony system.”
Once a system is built, the carriers can’t make a dime except by hanging an arbitrary meter on the flow. There’s nothing about that flow that costs them anything significantly extra - zero traffic or maxed out, allee samee, pretty much - so it’s all a market-adaptation move to get the maximum return from the minimum quantities.
I’ve experience a couple of similar service changes with AT&T in recent months- more data for less cost, and a change to unlimited calls/texts; offering a discount after your 2-year contract is up; then a recent increase from 10 to 15 gb for no cost. I suspected that competition was finally at work; if verizon is doing similar things, that must be it.
It tends to be circular and from what I can tell there are fewer competitors now with bigger stakes to manage. For a time, Sprint could get away with unlimited everything at a reasonable price because… well, I’m not sure why. But now it’s an increasingly level playing field with only three or four players going for all the marbles; with no tech improvements on the horizon, it’s time to get as many customers to pay as much as possible for what they have in place - which is distilling it down to market competition over all other factors.
Goody for us. 
You probably should prod him a bit anyway, at least as far as basic tips like doing the really data-intensive stuff on wifi if at all possible.
Verizon recently eliminated their 6 and 8GB plans. You can likely keep it if you already had it, but they’ve been replaced by the 10GB plan at $80/month. I had the 6GB plan up until last month when they “offered” me the 10GB plan free of charge.
Yeah, no. As someone who works for a large mobile provider on the IP network side of things, just in the past few years we’ve gone from 10-gig circuits to bundles of 10-gig circuits to 100-gig circuits for the various router interconnects, and that’s not being driven by massive increases in voice traffic.
If anything, it’s the reverse. An individual cell site might have a 100-meg metro ethernet circuit running to it, but it’s not carrying all that many more calls than it was a few years ago. And that voice traffic is now being converted to packet data for more and more of the network path because the technology and the infrastructure is there.
Where data rates come down, it’s not because it’s just freeloading off a voice system, it’s because technology always gets cheaper over time. A router blade that can handle a 10-gig circuit now costs less than it did a few years ago, etc. That, plus what market pressures still remain (in the US market at least) results in greater data plans over time.
No doubt. I’m streaming about 300Gb a month from my phones hotspot by using it to watch 4K versions of Breaking Bad on my UHD-TV and I could use more if If tried. I pay $34 a month for my unlimited data plan, it’s the future but it’s going require some significant upgrades to make it happen for everyone.
I recently made the change from 8GB to 10GB on Verizon. I didn’t get a call, but a text when I was close to the 8GB offering an additional 7GB for $10 (which would have put me in the 15GB plan). I was interested so I went online to discover the 8GB plan was no longer offered. I took the 10 GB plan for $10 less.