Verizon Share Everything Plan is an IQ Test

June 18, 2012 by Colin Berkshire

I hate it when a company I want to do business with makes me feel stupid–or treats me like I am stupid. Cell phone companies excel at giving me this feeling.

Note that I generally love Verizon. They have great customer service that is friendly and helpful. They have a voice network that works, unlike my AT&T experiences. Their data network is a bit sucky, but they are miles ahead of AT&T in the LTE category and that is important.

Verizon just announced their “Share Everything” plan that allows you to pool your minutes, text messages, and data with up to 10 devices. Oh, wait, no, you must buy unlimited voice and unlimited text messaging for each device so really the only thing you are sharing is your data plan. And, sharing your data plan is a bit silly to start with because it is priced based upon usage, so what really do you gain by sharing? The whole “Share Everything” plan is just weird and complicated.

Let me start by telling you what plan I would have designed for Verizon: We’ll call it “Fairly Good” because it is fair and a good deal:

$10 monthly for every device you connect
10-cents per minute for voice.
10-cents per text message.
$10 per gigabyte when purchased and committed in advance.
$10 if you run over your gigabyte commitment, but still just $10 per gigabyte.
$30 per device if you want flat-rate unlimited voice and text messaging.

Now, that is a plan everybody could understand. And, it is remarkably similar to their “Share Everything” plan.

Here is how Verizon muddles this up into a morass of complexity:

$40 a month per phone, except it is $30 if the phone isn’t a smartphone. Data devices are $10 a month unless they plug into a USB port or are a clamshell design in which case they are $20 a month. Data is $20 per gigabyte except that it is $5 a gigabyte when you buy more than two, except that it is $15 a gigabyte if you run over, plus there is a $40 monthly charge per account.

Did you get that? I sure didn’t. The new Verizon plan is hideously complicated, and it’s not even that good of a deal!

Today I pay $109 a month:

iPad: $20 (1 GB)

iPhone: $89 (2 GB + 900 minutes)

Under the new “Share Everything” plan I will pay $110

iPad: $10

iPhone: $40

Data: $20 (2 GB)

Account charge: $40

But I get 1 GB less under the new plan than the old plan. Say what? Am I stupid? OK, yes, I get unlimited voice, but I only use 600 minutes. (Most people use about 600 minutes, which is why the plans are rigged to offer 450 or 900 minutes, by the way.)

So I am here trying to decide whether cellular companies are run by stupid people, or whether they think customers are stupid, or if they have some sadistic delight in giving their customers headaches.

I’ll put forth that my “Fairly Good” plan is simple, honest, and would bring in more money for the cell phone companies.

I still can’t get over the name “Share Everything” when nothing is really shared at all.

Well, I’m going back to Asia now. My monthly service is $15 and includes 2GB of data and unlimited incoming calls. Outgoing minutes cost just 3-cents each. Sheesh.

By Colin Berkshire

Colin Berkshire is a highly technical HR executive in the Pulp and Paper Industry. Colin has an engineering and voice background, and is currently on assignment in Asia. NOTE: Colin does not respond to comments, and does not Tweet.

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Discussion

Aswath Rao June 18, 2012

Isn’t the $40 account charge only if you need voice service. If I need only data plan the account charge is really $10?

Reply
1. Colin Berkshire June 18, 2012
  
  The first device you add is $60 and if it is a tablet it is $90. This gives you 1GB of data, total. Considering that 1GB of data is worth $5~$10 then you can back that out and see that they are charging you a $40 account service fee. The pricing is quite obfuscated, and complicated. But there is a hefty “account service fee” built into the pricing structure.
  
  Reply
Hyoun Park June 18, 2012

It’s not supposed to be a good deal. Telcos live off of obfuscation! 😉 But I do think that this move to a device-based model of billing is fundamentally important. The price points are all still off, but the trend of trying to own every device associated with the data stream of an account is big change from traditional usage-based models.

The biggest problem is that this current version of Share Everything is still a monstrous hybrid of flat-rate, data usage, and various families of devices.I like your idea of $30 to buy in, $10 per device, $10 per GB sold in advance (which provides the carriers with a better idea of capacity required) and then some sort of reasonable data overage charge such as $20 per GB. The smart kids will move to a mostly Wi-Fi strategy so that the GB of cellular usage goes mostly unused and is just for emergencies. Eventually, the carriers will realize that as well and provide some sort of Wi-Fi offset plan where they actively guide devices to Wi-Fi networks. At this point, added incremental revenue becomes focused around networked devices (such as game consoles, cars, home automation, and other sensors).

The interesting part of this is that there is plenty of room for other players to scoot in front of the carriers and take this away. If that happens, the carriers go back to being dumb pipes that just try to jack up the prices until legislation forces them back down. Should be an interesting few years in wireless billing.

Reply
Dylapherd October 13, 2012

10 cents a text message?! Umm… My household uses around 5,000 – 12,000 a month! That would be INCREDIBLY expensive. How about they keep the old plans? They weren’t great. But right now we pay $150 a month for 700 minutes + Unlimited Text + Unlimited Data on one phone for 3 feature phones and 1 smartphone. Reasonable. This would turn into $200 a month for the same thing under share everything. And at $0.10 a text message it would be $1,200 a month for texting, please tell me I did something wrong! How about unlimited texting standard as it costs almost nothing on the network.

Reply