In this year’s first few weeks, Verizon Wireless lost more or less 400,000 postpaid phone subscribers. During the same period, the company launched its new unlimited data plans for smartphones. The launching has apparently turned things around for Verizon.
By the end of March 31, Verizon ended up with less customers according to the earning results that were released today by the company. Right after the launch, retail phone connections received a gain of more than 100,000. However, the gain was then followed by a phone loss of a total of 289,000.
According to the company, Verizon Unlimited’s launch positively changed customer addition’s trajectory in the quarter. Overall, the company has the most number of wireless subscribers in the country. For the past couple of years, T-Mobile USA gained millions worth of customers because they used the strategy of offering better deals. These deals were said to be better than what Verizon and AT&T offer to their customers.
T-Mobile is one of the companies that are responsible for bringing unlimited data plans back to the mobile market of the country. The popular unlimited plan of T-Mobile forced Verizon to also offer one for the consumers.
As always, customers should know that the term “unlimited” that is often used by carriers still has its limits. No fees will be charged to customers once they go over the data cap, but the speed will be throttled, especially when there’s network congestion. This is for customers who have already used up their allocated amount of data. With Verizon, if you are connected to one of their congested cell towers, you will be throttled right after you pass the 22 GB cap in a matter of 30 days. T-Mobile, on the other hand, will throttle once the customer reaches 30GB. This means that while you can use unlimited data, your speed will be slowed down if you are a heavy user.
If the data is unlimited, it will only be for the phone itself. Carriers place limits on mobile hotspot application use. These applications let tablets and laptops share the internet connection of a phone. T-Mobile was limiting streaming high-quality videos as well, unless a customer pays extra. The added HD video streaming is already included in the base plan of T-Mobile as a response to the unlimited plan of Verizon. The unlimited plans of Verizon start at $80 per month for a single line.
The total operating revenues of Verizon, including wireless services were $29.8 billion for the first quarter. It is down by 7.3% year over year. Its net income was at $3.6 billion, which is already down by 19.8% year over year.
Verizon FiOS gave the company 35,000 internet subscribers. However, it lost at least 13,000 video subscribers in the same time period. The report that the company released showed that Verizon had more than 5 million Verizon FiOS internet connections, as well as more than 4 million Verizon FiOS video connections. Respectively, the year over year increases are at 3.3% and 0.1%.
