Verizon Wireless reveals $150 20GB shared data plan, and four others
The high-end plans are available, but are not posted on Verizon's Web site — Verizon Wireless Tuesday revealed that there are five additional data tiers over and above the six tiers announced with its Share Everything plans earlier this summer.
Context & Ripple Effects
Verizon's move to account-level pricing has been building since it ended unlimited data: the $30-for-2GB tiered packages of July 2011 were per-device, and the Share Everything plans introduced in June 2012 shifted the unit of sale to the household — one bucket of data spread across up to 10 devices with unlimited talk and text. Those plans shipped with six data tiers when they went on sale in late June.
Today's disclosure adds five more tiers above that original ladder, topped by a $150 plan carrying 20GB of shared data — and notably, the plans are purchasable but absent from Verizon's own Web site, suggesting they are being surfaced through sales channels rather than marketed broadly. The pickup across CNET, The Verge, Digital Trends and others shows how closely the carrier community is watching where Verizon sets the ceiling on shared pricing.
First-order effects
- Heavy-data households running multiple devices gain a legitimate top tier: $150 buys 20GB pooled across up to 10 lines, an option that did not exist under the six tiers announced in June.
- Because the new tiers are unposted on Verizon's site, customers only find them if a sales rep or third-party coverage surfaces them — pricing transparency becomes a channel decision, not a given.
Second-order effects
- AT&T, which matched Verizon into shared-data pricing this summer, now faces pressure to extend its own Mobile Share ladder upward or concede the heaviest multi-device users to Verizon's ceiling tier.
- The higher tiers give Verizon room to discount mid-tier shared plans without touching its headline entry price, sharpening price discrimination between light single-device users and connected-family accounts.
Third-order effects
- If carriers keep extending shared ladders upward, the industry's pricing unit completes its migration from the SIM to the household — data becomes a pooled utility billed per account, with device count as the growth lever rather than per-line add-ons.
- Quietly listed premium tiers point toward a market where the advertised plan grid is only the floor, and real price discovery happens in-store — a transparency gap regulators may eventually be asked to look at.
The trend: US wireless pricing is consolidating around household-level shared data buckets whose ceilings keep rising, turning multi-device families into the primary revenue target.