Verizon's Absurd Mandatory Data Fees

Since January 18^th, 2010, Verizon has imposed a ridiculous $10 per month mandatory data fee to all lines that use a 3g phone. Even with extras like unlimited texting, a family plan could still go up by as much as 33% for something most people have absolutely no use for. A child that wants the phone his or her sibling just got will put pressure on the parents to pay $10 a month for no reason, even if they block the internet service. If any of the other phones on the plan break or the line has an upgrade available, they will require these data fees. This may not seem like too much, but for a family of four that is $40 a month, and $480 a year.

It is true that the "feature" phones do not require data fees, but they are plagued by miserable hardware specs like outdated cameras and minimal amounts of memory. A customer with a 3g phone may choose to "upgrade" to one of these phones, but this requires paying additional money for a phone that is infinitely worse. In addition, what happens to the phone producers that count on people buying the newest, fastest, and aesthetically pleasing cell phones? What will happen to LG when half of the families that normally bought expensive phones like the EnV series now buy "downgrades" to prehistoric models in the "feature phone" section? It is too early to tell whether parents will dish out the extra $480 a year in addition to the cost of the phones, but according to the VZW forums, thousands of people are already migrating towards different companies.

Raising prices for middle class families is nothing short of a pathetic business scam. Verizon will not make any significant leaps in profits, but will continue to lose more and more customers to other companies, with many of their phone models eventually catering to the people that do not want to pay the mandatory data fees. Essentially, VZW has removed the "middle class" of phones; consumers can either go high-end or very low-end. The $10 a month fee is extremely expensive given the user only gets to use 25mb of internet usage (compared to AT&T's $15 200mb plan.) Really, the only option if you are a data user is to pay $30 a month for unlimited internet, and if you are not, to just waste loads of money on something you may never use and almost certainly will never need. If all of the unsatisfied non-data customers on the VZW forums actually switch companies, Verizon is in for a big surprise when data users realize AT&T has much better deals. Economically, there is no longer any reason to stay with VZW. Unsatisfied customers may choose to contact the President and CEO of Verizon Wireless with a link I posted in resources.