Tiered data plans - Not terrible YET!

Now Verizon Wireless has jumped onto the tiered data plan bandwagon.  Up until now you could get unlimited data for $30 a month.  To me that seems a little expensive until I saw the new setup.  Now $30 will only get you 2GB of data, $50 for 5 GB and $80 for 10 GB!  That just seems outrageous!  Luckily, I took advantage of an early upgrade and now am grandfathered in to the unlimited plan.

The data part of the plan is what makes smartphones so powerful and useful.  Without that...an ipod touch and a Moto RAZR would take care of business just fine.  The wireless providers say that more than 90% of users consume less than 2 GB per month.  Well, that may be true now but, with all of the new and more powerful apps that are coming out data consumption is poised to go through the roof!  2 GB isn't going to cut it much longer.  They say that people can now find a price point that meets their needs.  And the "band width hogs" will have to pay their fair share.  With the advent of cloud computing everything is going to need a data connection to access it.

Let's take a look at a couple of items that come to mind right now.  Amazon and Google both have cloud based storage for your music.  My whole music collection is "stored" with Google and their music service.  I also have some music stored with Amazon.  These services are amazingly convenient to have.  Anytime that I have a data connection I can access ANY song that I have stored digitally.  Without taking up any room on my phone!  These convenient services really start to eat up your monthly data allowance.  Now with Netflix starting to be available on select handsets data consumption is going to explode!

And that's why the tiered data services are here.  To protect the carriers inferior network from crashing down around them.  Have you ever tried using data services on your phone at a professional sporting event?  Usually you will find that data rates are painfully slow.  Everyone in that stadium is hitting that same tower and they don't have enough bandwidth to support it all at once.  That is just a small scale illustration of what would happen everywhere if too many people are streaming music and video all the time.  Everyone would suffer until the carriers can drastically increase the bandwidth capacity of each and every cell tower out there.  Obviously, this isn't cheap.

I am not in favor of tiered data plans at all.  I'm not sure what the final solution is but there has to be a better way.  I think that I would prefer throttling instead.  If I use more than 2 GB of data then I could just keep consuming data but just at a slower speed.  Hmmm...but, would that affect my streaming music or video?  If it does why would I want to keep paying for something that doesn't do what I want?  Man, this is not easy.  As a consumer, I feel that I am being taken advantage of.  I do see the provider's point of view on the matter as well.

I don't have the answer.  Do you?  Does anyone out there have a better plan?  What are your opinions on tiered data vs. unlimited?  I would like to hear from you.

Have fun and use that data!