Unlimited Cellular

Cellular Goes Unlimited

Posted by Sam Churchill on April 15th, 2008

Verizon Wireless this week unveiled two all-you-can-eat plans for smartphones.

The carrier, taking on rivals AT&T and Sprint, is adding unlimited mobile email and browsing plans for small business users and everyday consumers respectively.

For $30 a month, Verizon subscribers will be able to surf and send emails from their phones until their fingers ache, says Unstrung. It requires a qualifying voice plan through business sales channels. The plan will work with the Verizon SMT5800, the XV6800, and the Motorola Q9m. The operator already has a similar offering for the BlackBerry and promises to offer the plan for more smartphone models soon.

The hosted VZEmail service, meanwhile, is aimed at the small business owner. It adds “storage, capacity, and speed” of an enterprise system, without the expense. The plan starts at $8 a month for a basic email setup.

The big three operators are now pushing unlimited talk for $99 a month:

• AT&T has a bolt-on unlimited data plan for $35 a month and offers an all-you-can-eat plan with Apple’s iPhone.
• Sprint’s “Simply Everything” plan outdoes its larger rival’s offerings with a $99 monthly contract that adds unlimited data to the mix along with mobile television.

Speaking with Unstrung at the CTIA Show in Vegas recently, Verizon wireless CTO Tony Melone explained why the operator has simultaneously embraced unlimited calling for voice, while moving away from unlimited data.

“There is a limit to how much people can talk in a given month, yet the industry took 25 years to sort of get to an unlimited voice,” Melone says. “With data, where’s virtually no limit on… consumption; the industry went right out of the gate with unlimited, which is kind of backwards in my opinion.”

Meanwhile, Leap Wireless already offers unlimited voice plans at around half of the cost of the big operator’s services.

In other news, T-Mobile signed up Juice Wireless as a social-networking provider for its network. JuiceCaster lets you meet new people, connect with friends and share your photos and videos directly from your mobile phone and instantly update your status on Twitter and Facebook. T-Mobile is its first Tier I operator customer.

source : dailywireless.org