Verizon To Offer Unlimited Data iPhone Plan, Price War

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 10, 6:41AM EST · Published Jan 9, 4:43PM EST

Verizon (NYSE: VZ) will offer unlimited data plans when it rolls out the Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone next month, according to The Wall Street Journal. AT&T (NYSE: T), previously the exclusive provider of the smartphone, offers only capped data plans.

The move by Verizon is likely to cause the one thing that wireless providers have hoped to avoid–price wars. The Verizon unlimited data plan is meant to pull customers from AT&T. AT&T will certainly match the Verizon wireless plan and may decide to offer a program which is even more competitive.

The number of wireless subscriber in the US is about 300 million, which means it is near saturation levels. The four major providers–T-Mobile, Sprint-Nextel (NYSE: S), Verizon Wireless, and AT&T — fight for market share. The industry has hoped that consumer would pay high rates for the ability to transfer video and data files. It turns out that the opposite may be true. The carriers have begun to turn to price as a means to attract customers.

The need to offer more services to subscribers for less money would particularly hurt the fortunes of AT&T and Verizon which have lost a great deal of their previously profitable landline business. A sharp drop in margins in their healthy wireless business would damage their fortunes permanently.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.