Verizon Wireless is expected to stop selling unlimited data plans to new customers within six months, says the WSJ, instead opting to offer two plans with monthly bandwidth caps.
In June, AT&T made a similar move, dropping the unlimited 3G data plan while starting to offer three capped plans.
Earlier in the week, Sprint said the company may have to cap unlimited 4G data plans, especially if usage increases exponentially.
For the Q1 2010, average smartphone data consumption jumped to 298MB per month, from an average of 90MB during the period in 2009.
Nielsen research recently concluded that usage-based pricing models are actually fair, as the average smartphone user does not need unlimited. After reviewing 60,000 phone bills, Nielsen says the top 6 percent of smartphone data users use 49 percent of all bandwidth. That leaves the other 94 percent of users for the other half.
It is unclear what the new tiered plans will look like, but most expect them to be similar to AT&T’s, which cost $15 for 200MB and $25 for 2GB. Unlimited plans currently cost $30.
Result for: pricing model
AT&T has announced new data plans for their smartphone line, including the iPhone and iPad tablet, which will be less expensive for customers, but will also limit data use.
The cheapest new plan is $15 per month, but will only include 200MB of data. If customers go over the limit, they will be charged $15 extra for every 200MB of data, a very expensive proposition.
A more reasonable plan is $25 per month which gives smartphone, tablet users 2GB of data for the month. For every 1GB over the cap they go, they will be charged $10.
AT&T charges $30 per month for unlimited data plans.
The company says 65 percent of smartphone owners use less than 200MB of data per month, and 98 percent use less than 2GB. For the most part, the only people who need unlimited are iPhone users.
Says Ralph de la Vega, president of AT&T’s mobile unit: “We’re breaking free from the traditional ‘one-size-fits-all’ pricing model and making the mobile Internet more affordable to a greater number of people.”
The new pricing plans start June 7th.
Result for: pricing model
Hannover House, the video and film distributor has announced today a new deal with Google that will launch a video rental and VOD channel for Hannover on YouTube.
Starting this week, the channel will have 100 films from Hannover House, Elite Entertainment, FOCUSFilms, and Plaza Entertainment.
“YouTube and Google are uniquely positioned to reinvent the entire video-on-demand consumer model,” says Eric Parkinson, C.E.O. “Their reach is unsurpassed, and their consumer pricing model is extremely competitive, in many cases beating traditional video rental costs. With more and more consumers moving toward video-on-demand as a convenient way to view movies, the Hannover House movie channel venture with YouTube will prove invaluable to our company.”
“We believe that video-on-demand will continue to grow over the next few years into a major revenue source for the company. The technology has reached the point where films can be quickly and safely streamed directly to consumers, and this creates an immediacy not previously available. Additionally, video-on-demand eliminates the inventory, freight and storage costs associated with hard goods items such as DVDs and Blu-ray units.”
