Verizon's new Share Everything data plans kicked in a little over a month ago, ditching unlimited data in favor of several tiers of capped data, which in turn would be shared with multiple devices on a single plan.
Though Verizon revealed six different plans initially, ranging from 1GB/$50 to 10GB/$100, new information has come to light detailing five additional plans, including one that ups the data usage to 20GB/$150.
Everything in between is 12GB for $110, 14GB for $120, 16GB for $130, 18GB for $140.
If you've never heard of these alternative plans, that's because the company only offers them on customer support lines or during overages.
Price discrepancy
Each device added to any of the five plans will cost an extra $10 per tablet, $20 per Jetpack/USB dongle/notebook, $30 per basic phone and $40 per smartphone every month.
Verizon is effectively offering more data plans for customers who need to share bigger pools of data.
However, the larger plans reveal an outstanding discrepancy between the price per gigabyte and what Verizon charges its customers.
Even with unlimited calls and texts included in the price, customers are being charged $50 per GB, yet a a plan exists that only charges $7.50 for every GB.
20 times the data for 1/7 the price
Since all of the plans include unlimited texting and calls, the only difference in pricing comes down to how much data you want to share.
Verizon maintains most of its customers don't go over 2GBs a month, but even that plan comes in at $30 per GB, which is almost half the price of what they charge for 1GB.
As the plans increase in shared GBs, the price per GB drops significantly, which begs leads to the question of why the price of data fluctuate so drastically?
If Verizon's current top tier Share Everything plan delivers 20GBs of data for $150 a month ($7.50/GB), why does the company charge someone who only needs to use 1GB a month nearly seven times as much per GB?
TechRadar spoke with Verizon's Brenda Raney, who offered us an explanation for the Share Everything price points.
"Pricing is based on a number of strategies and while cost is a part of the part of the equation, we recognize people are using more and more data," she said.
"We introduced the Shared Data Plans so customers could share their data service across multiple devices.
Those customers who purchase more data are effectively given a discount. If I had to use an analogy from a different industry, I would look to the consumer goods where people who purchase in bulk pay less per unit cost."
Verizon's explanation would make sense if data was a finite resource, however, charging people more for less of an unlimited commodity makes the information a little hard to swallow.
Via Hot Hardware and BGR
