Verizon CTO Lynch says that flat rate unlimited data plans cannot live forver

Verizon CTO Dick Lynch has just given the 2 minute warning to Verizon customers. In a wireless life of the future, where everything from your cellphone to your car is connected to the cell carriers, Lynch warns that the days of one set price for unlimited data is over. Instead, the nation's largest carrier would probably resort to usage-based pricing where a base rate is set and then certain devices will be authorized to use Big Red's network. The customer would pay for the service depending on how much bandwidth was used by the customer to run those devices. According to Lynch, the problem the carriers face today are with those "bandwidth hogs" using gigabytes per month and paying megabytes per month. These are the users that are being subsidized by the customers who pay monthly for service, but barely tap into the network. "That isn’t long-term sustainable. " says Verizon's CTO, "Why should customers using an average amount of bandwidth be subsidizing bandwidth hogs?" Lynch envisions a future where much of the bandwidth offered by Verizon being used for gadgets and devices bought at Best Buy or sold through other third parties like Google. As for LTE, the so-called 4G network has been set up by Big Red in Boston and Seattle but both locations are not yet ready for customers. At the end of the year, Verizon hopes to have LTE ready to serve an area covering 100 million people.

source: WashingtonPost via EngadgetMobile

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