Verizon customers with two-year contracts can keep and renew them, and still get phone subsidies
Karl Bode / DSLreports :
Context & Ripple Effects
Days after Verizon moved to kill the two-year model entirely — [[a:831703|replacing subsidized phones and contracts with four flat data plans plus a $20 monthly smartphone access fee]] — it has reversed course for existing customers: two-year contracts can be kept and renewed, subsidies intact. The walk-back lands in a market where T-Mobile is actively buying defections from Big Red, including covering Verizon Edge and AT&T Next bills for switchers.
The concession reads less like a strategy change than a retention valve: Verizon keeps its new no-contract pricing architecture for new signups while leaving the legacy subsidy door open for customers who might otherwise defect.
First-order effects
- Verizon customers coming off a two-year contract can now renew rather than being forced onto the new $30-80/month plans with the $20 smartphone access fee, preserving their subsidized-phone path.
Second-order effects
- T-Mobile's poaching playbook — most recently a free year of Hulu for Verizon defectors — loses some of its 'everyone else abandoned you' framing, since Verizon now visibly retains contracts.
- Sprint is nonetheless moving ahead with killing two-year contracts per a leaked internal document, isolating Verizon as the only major US carrier keeping both models side by side alongside its new annual iPhone upgrade plan.
Third-order effects
- If Sprint follows through, the two-year subsidized contract becomes a Verizon-only retention instrument rather than an industry default, hastening the broader shift toward device installments and unlocked upgrade programs across all four carriers.
The trend: US carriers are dismantling the two-year handset-subsidy model, with Verizon keeping it alive only as a customer-retention backstop while T-Mobile and Sprint push the market fully toward no-contract pricing.