Verizon may follow AT&T with tiered data plans

Analysts believe that Verizon Wireless might be the only other U.S. wireless provider prepared to follow AT&T and offer a tiered pricing scheme for wireless data plans.

It's also believed Vodafone in Europe could offer a tiered plan in the future, but it's unknown when the company will make an official announcement.

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The Reuters report doesn't offer a prediction for the Verizon or Vodafone data plan announcements, but it's believed each company is finalizing plans over the summer.

We previously reported that AT&T will offer tiered data plans starting at $15 and $25 per month, depending on the total amount of data used.  The cheaper DataPlus plan includes 200MB of data, with additional blocks of 200MB costing $15. The more expensive DataPro plan provides 2GB of data, with each extra 2GB available for an extra $10 per month.

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Both AT&T and Verizon are looking for ways to reduce stress on their data networks, and these tiered plans could be a good solution.  The majority of AT&T subscribers will save $5 per month for the premium package, while AT&T will reduce strain on its networks.

Analysts are still unsure whether or not this will be a major issue for most subscribers -- AT&T says just 2 percent of its current data subscribers are heavy use subscribers.

I hope AT&T continues to try and improve its nationwide 3G coverage, as I still routinely come across spots in the San Francisco Bay Area -- a heavily populated region with a high number of smartphone users -- where 3G coverage completely disappears.

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T-Mobile and Sprint-Nextel are not expected to follow in AT&T's footsteps for their higher end data plans -- but both companies will probably offer a low-end data subscription plan sometime in the near future.  Each company has additional network capacity, and a cheap unlimited data plan could be ideal to try and convince some disgruntled AT&T or Verizon subscribers to switch away.

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