Verizon Considers Metered Billing for 3G Data Plans

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Is Verizon going to pull a fast one and completely change the way it charges for its 3G data plans? Are we going to see Big Red introduce a metered billing scheme which should, at least in theory, be fairer to users?

It seems that Dick Lynch, Verizon’s CTO favors metered billing instead of flat-rate pricing. Basically what he says is that hardcore users are taking advantage of the unlimited plans in order to use as much bandwidth as possible as opposed to others that use a lot less data while surfing the web on their 3G smartphones or data cards.

When you put it like that it would seem only fair that those of us that use a lot of bandwidth should pay more than those that don’t do the same “crime.” But I bet that while Verizon will gladly raise fees for hardcore users, they would not lower fees for those folks that don’t do that much surfing.

On a different note, looking at everything from the distance it looks like Verizon may be preparing for two major things. One is the LTE launch which should happen later this year and the other one should be the inevitable arrival of the iPhone to Big Red.

With customers having to pay for what they use Verizon could avoid the “crash” of its network and iPhone users might not experience the same problems they had with AT&T. People will surely restrain themselves after reaching a certain acceptable monthly quota and hardcore users might not hog the network as easily as before.

Hopefully LTE networks will be able to withstand a great deal of traffic but that doesn’t mean that some folks will not try to take advantage of faster download speeds as much as possible.

Verizon hasn’t officially announced any plans regarding this meter based payment initiative so don’t get alarmed by it just yet. In the mean time Verizon will have to deal with the FCC regarding its newly adopted ETFs so I guess it will be a while until it will does come up with new data plans for its customers.