Snippet: Verizon’s New Plans Make Sense to Nobody Except Verizon ☇

Allison Johnson for The Verge:

Hey, did you hear? Verizon has incredibly, out of the goodness of its heart, revealed new phone plans that don’t include “bloated” service bundles. How thoughtful! There’s just one catch: they’re kinda less expensive, except not really, because things that used to be included are now an extra $10 per month each. Wait, that… kind of sucks? Who exactly comes out ahead with these new plans?

You guessed it! It’s Verizon.

On the surface, the new plans sound simpler than the current Get More, Play More, etc. There are two options — an expensive one and a bit less expensive one — and you add the extra services you want, like the Disney / Hulu bundle or Apple Music Family a la carte. That’s nice in theory, but if you’re switching from one of the current unlimited plans, it’s very likely you’ll need to pay more if you want the same things you used to get included in your monthly rate.

It seems that with the advent of the smartphone, the average single-line postpaid plan went from about $40/month to $80/month. While I understand adding data changed the whole dynamic, it feels like the last decade has had a lot of “innovation” with plans, but mostly that they just keep getting consistently worse. Verizon was especially bad with multiple unlimited plans with dumb names. T-Mobile’s “un-carrier” run countered that a bit, but they’ve been inching back to being like everyone else. I was never a fan of bundled add-ons or that advertised pricing is for each line on four-line accounts (“only $30/month”), but it’s the nature of the industry. Single and even two-line accounts are better off with prepaid, as long as you don’t need to finance devices.

Unfortunately, these new plans for Verizon just aren’t very good and I’m not sure they will help turn around the losses.