Verizon recently announced their Share Everything mobile plans and are set to put them into action on June 28. The company says that it’s a great way to easily share a bucket-full of minutes, text messages, and data amongst a family, but some users are skeptical.
If you’ve read the internet lately, many people have been giving Verizon a lot of grief about these new plans. But after looking everything over myself, Share Everything data plans are actually not a bad way to go. Let’s break it down and compare some things.
First though, let’s look at the details of these new plans:
Okay, let’s begin comparing Verizon’s current FamilyShare plans with their upcoming Share Everything plans. First, we’ll see what the monthly cost is of a FamilyShare plan with two people with smartphones:
- 700 Anytime Minutes – $70
- Unlimited shared messaging – $30
- Two 2GB data plans – $60
- Additional line for 2nd person – $10
Total cost per month: $170
If these same two people wanted to go with the Share Everything plan, this is how it would look:
- Line access for two smartphones – $80
- 4GB data plan (w/ unltd. min. and msg.) – $70
Total cost per month: $150
The Share Everything plan is $20 cheaper and includes unlimited minutes instead of just a limited 700. Seems like a better deal to me. Now let’s bump it up to a family of four where all of them have smartphones. Here’s what a normal FamilyShare plan would look like:
- 700 Anytime Minutes – $70
- Unlimited shared messaging – $30
- Four 2GB data plans – $120
- Additional lines for 3 people – $30
Total cost per month: $250
This is what the monthly charges would be if that same family went with a Shared Everything data plan:
- Line access for four smartphones – $160
- 8GB data plan (w/ unltd. min. and msg.) – $90
Total cost per month: $250
It’s the same cost! But yet again, you get unlimited minutes with the newer shared plan and you have a whopping 8GB of data that you can share amongst the entire family. So if mom hardly uses any data, then all the better for the rest of the family.
However, Verizon’s Share Everything plans still don’t solve the one problem that most carriers are guilty of with contractual plans: There’s no middle ground. Carriers only offer their customers either too little or too much with their plans, intentionally not including any kind of middle ground. Why? Because the middle ground is the sweet spot that’s of greatest value to the customer. And when the customer gets the greatest value, the wireless carrier loses in a way.
And Verizon really isn’t doing anything revolutionary with these new shared plans. Sure, depending on how big of a family you have and how much data you use, the Share Everything plans could save you a few dollars and simplify things a bit, but it’s all simply just a reworked way to divvy out minutes, messages and data.
In the end, just by looking at the charts above I can see how users would scoff at Verizon — $40/month just to add a smartphone line to a plan? That fact alone seems like highway robbery, but you have to look at the whole picture and do the math. Verizon’s Share Everything plans certainly aren’t any worse than what they’re offering now, and in some cases, it could be a better way to go.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.