Remember back when candy bar phones and flip phones were the hot new thing, and all the wireless providers jumped into the fray trying to offer you rollover minutes to come sign up with them? Well, if the rumor mill is to be believed, we might all be climbing on board the rollover train again… this time, in the data era.
A thread has surfaced on Reddit in which Verizon Wireless employees are discussing some kind of “huge new promo” launching on Friday — July 1 — and trying to suss out what it is. The answer seems to be that Verizon has done a 180 on their adamant denial from last year and is going to start offering some kind of monthly data rollover plan to customers.
In addition to the rollover data, Verizon is also rumored to be offering an alternative to overage fees: data throttling, in which you can still use your phone and connect to the internet when you’ve hit your data limit, but only very slowly. Customers who opt in to this “safety mode” would be swapped to the worse service when they hit their data cap, instead of paying $15 for each extra gig.
An image from a Verizon test site going around indicates that all Verizon Wireless customers would be eligible for the rollover data “to the end of the following month,” which seems to imply an AT&T-style “use it or lose it” 30-day expiration scheme.
If the image is to be believed, the throttling measure, “Safety Mode,” would be a free option for any “XL” (12 GB / $80) or “XXL” (18 GB / $100) plan, and subscribers with lower-volume data plans could opt into it for an additional $5 a month.
This rumor is worth taking with an entire bucket full of salt; the sourcing is unknown and unverifiable. Still, it’s well within the bounds of plausibility. T-Mobile introduced a rollover data scheme in December of 2014, and AT&T followed just a month later.
Verizon has been adamant that they would do no such thing, with company CFO Fran Shammo saying in 2015 that Verizon is “a leader, not a follower” and “did not go to places where we did not financially want to go to save a customer.”
But times change, and so does the mobile market: now that everyone has a phone, the way to get new customers is to pinch them from other providers. And maybe in 2016, rollover data is the carrot that Verizon needs to use to make that happen.
by Kate Cox via Consumerist