It looks a lot like Verizon is going to follow in the much-criticized footsteps of AT&T and their tiered data plans, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Before you scream "travesty!", consider this: Nielson (the company that analyzes everything so others don't have to) has reported that 99% of the 60,000 phone bills they had looked at would benefit from a tiered pricing structure.

The average monthly consumption of mobile data has risen from last year's 90MB up to 298MB this year. This is, obviously, nowhere even close to 5GB that some "unlimited" plans include but also takes non-smartphone users into account. The usage for smartphones is said to be about half of the allotted 5GB. Smartphones are becoming not only more powerful but, especially with the dawn of Android, much, much more common. If I had to guess, I would speculate that this average would increase drastically over the coming years. The switch to tiered data, however, is not up to me or my awesome powers of speculation. Coming back to Verizon, the WSJ report says that the carrier will start rolling out the tiered data plan system in the next 4 to 6 months but has not yet decided on pricing. One thing is clear, the report goes on to say: Verizon will not copy AT&T's pricing structure ($15/200MB or $25/2GB).

With AT&T already doing this, Verizon planning the rollout in the near future, and Sprint potentially knocking on tiered data's door, according to Sprint's CEO Dan Hesse, it looks like the days of unlimited data pie in America may be numbered. This makes the power users among us pretty sad. How about you?

Source: Reuters