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Monday 25 July 2016

Verizon's Prepaid Customers Can Stay Connected Even After Consuming Data Allotments


The nation’s biggest telecom giant unveiled a service that gives a provision to its prepaid customers to stay connected at lower speeds even after the consumption of high-speed data allotments.

The telecom company also recently revealed certain new data plans for postpaid customers including rollover data and a similar provision to stay connected at lower speeds even after exceeding data allotments.

The prepaid offering, named “Always-on-data” debuted on July 17. The speed will reduce to 128kb/second after users cross the data caps for the remaining billing cycle. This service is quite similar to the “Safety Mode” feature that was introduced by the company last week at the time of rolling out new pricing plans. The difference between the two is that “Safety Mode” costs an extra $5 a month for customers with inexpensive service plans whereas in “Always-on-data”, the prepaid users do not have to pay any charge. But for postpaid users the feature costs an additional $5 a month.

Droid Life reported the new feature and a Verizon representative confirmed the offer.
The US carrier received criticism last week over upsurge of prices of the monthly plans and the respective data allotments. Verizon cleared the air that the move is not actually price hike, rather the price per gigabyte is lower in the new plans.

The three prepaid plans offered by the company include unlimited text in the US, Canada and Mexico, and unlimited talk and text within the country. Among the new plans, a Wi-Fi only data plan is for $30 per month, 3 GB of LTE data and mobile hotspot capability for $45 per month, and 6 GB of LTE data with mobile hotspot and unlimited calling to Mexico and Canada for $60 a month. 


With this new move, the company has indicated that it is targeting the prepaid market. In another recent move, Verizon has increased the data by two times in some of its prepaid plans.

As the value gap between the prepaid and postpaid customers is closing, the company seems to pay attention to the fierce competition in the telecom market.

Tuesday 19 July 2016

Sprint and T-Mobile Swoop Down on Price Hike by Verizon


Verizon ups the charges for its monthly plans as well as the amount of data offered in these plans, to which the competitors, namely T-Mobile and Sprint were quick to react.

The United States' largest carrier hikes its monthly service by $5 to $10 monthly along with adding supplementary data in each of these plans. Some additional features were also introduced such as "Safety Mode" feature that lets users stay connected even if they reach their monthly allocations, while decreasing speed to 128 Kbps and enabling users to keep unused data from the last month.

But several offers were already sailed out by its competitors, to which the competitors pounced upon quickly. John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile tweeted that his company has introduced a data rollover feature through its Data Stash offering long before.

He tweeted "If you're going to copy #DataStash, why copy @att's sad version of it?" "A copy of a copy = a terrible @verizon version of @TMobile #DataStash."

Marcelo Claure, Sprint CEO also mentioned "GREAT strategy @Verizon," "Step 1: Raise prices. Step 2: Tell them you aren't raising prices. Step 3: Tell them to be thankful. #SwitchtoSprint."

While this seems to be a price hike, some analysts noted that the company actually dropped the prices in terms of cost per gigabyte of data. And the move is looked at as an effort to better monetize its users. For instance, "Safety Mode" charges $5 per month for customers who are not currently on the company’s two costliest data plans. 


As per a research note written by Wells Fargo Securities analysts "While Verizon continues to lead the industry in network performance (as shown from numerous third-party studies), in some ways a case could be made with these new plans and offerings Verizon is acting more 'me too' to meet some of the perks which Verizon's competitors are already offering." "While an increase in the monthly recurring charge is a positive for ARPU – with things like Data Rollover and Safety Mode offered – there are more opportunities for customers to be smarter with their data usage and limit the upsell capability of this ARPU."

Tuesday 12 July 2016

The Most Expensive Plans of AT&T’s MVNO H2O Gain Significant Data


AT&T’s MVNOs are known to offer some of the best whole nationwide coverage maps per dollar. H2O Wireless, an MVNO that runs on AT&T Mobility's network and is managed by Fort Lee, N.J. based Locus Telecommunications has revised three of its most expensive monthly plans, a move that will shower a whole lot of supplementary data on its customers. A significant amount of additional data has been added to each plan, while no change to pricing is made.

The $60 monthly plan which initially holds 3GB of data will now offer 4.5GB data and unlimited talk and text. Another monthly plan worth $50 doubled the data from 2GB to 4GB. The third plan to upgrade data is the $40 monthly plan in which the data has been tripled from its previous amount.

No changes were made to the MVNO’s cheaper plans. All of its plans offer unlimited text and calling that includes unlimited international talk and text to more than 50 countries. Varying sums of credit for international voice calls are also part of the plans.

The company announced the updated plans a fortnight ago, as reported by the Prepaid Phone News. The change is also propagated via the company’s twitter page.

H2O is managed by a subsidiary of Japanese telecom KDDI. The company proudly holds 45 million mobile users and a good number of 8 million fixed-line broadband customers and generated approximately $43 billion the previous year. 


The company keeps updating its offerings in order to be in line with the competitive market. As per a statement passed by H2O sometime back "H2O Wireless faces fierce competition in the market so we are always looking for ways to continuously expand our consumer offerings.” In 2013, it offered unlimited data at $60 per month by withdrawing the offer and substituting it with a 2GB cover in 2011. Also, the service provider boosted its data allotments last year in Oct, relapsing to its previous plans.

Thursday 7 July 2016

Verizon Partners With Korea Telecom for 5G


The major US carriers AT&T, Verizon and Sprint have been conducting initial trials to test 5G services for quite some time. Out of all, Verizon took the lead by partnering with Korea Telecom to deliver 5G wireless service. The pair of companies will work to determine the technologies that would be required to establish standards for 5G services.

Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the FCC mentioned in his speech to promote awareness regarding 5G services and its tentative benefits to the country. 5G is said to offer speed which will be ten times than that of 4G.

As per predictions made by other companies, it is said that 5G technology will become available by 2020 but, Verizon and Korea Telecom believe that their collaboration will result in providing 5G services by 2018. Under the deal, both companies will put forth efforts to accelerate commercialization of the improved technology.

Korea Telecom is scheduled to research and develop this technology by the Pyeong Chang Winter Olympics which are going to be held in the South Korean city in 2018. After signing the agreement, Verizon showed Korea Telecom’s chairman its testing location in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Here, Verizon showed speeds up to 1.8 gigahertz per second by using fixed wireless point to multipoint technology. Big Red has also shown interest in Korea Telecom’s 5G millimeter wave technology. 


Following the agreement with KT, Verizon announced an alliance with KT, SK Telecom and NTT DoCoMo to develop 5G trial stipulations to serve a platform for radio interface trial activities. The announcement regarding the initiative was made in February and at that time the companies stated that technical trials would begin this year. The companies also signed a deal in an LTE broadcast alliance (LTE-B). It is made to allow various end user devices to share one multimedia stream.

Verizon previously took the lead by being the first US carrier to enter into 4G LTE services. The speed of 5G data is almost 100 times faster than that of 4G LTE. Maintaining the lead, the company seems pretty confident to offer 5G services within the specified time.