When Verizon announced their Share Everything plans a month or so ago, I was really excited. Other major cell phone providers in America only allow you to share voice minutes and text, but Verizon will be the first to allow you to share data. Then they announced their prices and it seemed excessively overpriced. Each smartphone was an additional $40, which was similar to before ($10 line access + $30 data plan), but instead of getting its own pool of 2GB of data, we now share the data allotment.
So I was very skeptical about the new plans and it appears they received a lot of backlash for the pricing. I didn’t bother researching much further into it.
I forget where I saw it, but a Verizon Share Everything Plan ad mentioned mobile hotspot. After a bit of research, I found out that every device has included mobile hotspot at no extra charge! This was something I currently pay $20/mo for just 1 line. If I wanted it on multiple lines, it’ll cost an extra $20 per line.
Yes, it does use your shared data allotment, but I use the mobile hotspot mainly when WiFi isn’t readily available and keep it mainly for emergencies.
Did I mention the Share Everything plan includes unlimited talk and unlimited text. Not something I really care about anymore, but am happy it’s something I don’t have to worry about going over anymore.
So to break things down, here’s my previous plan:
- 700 shared minutes
- 250 text messages on 1st line; 1000 text messages on 2nd line
- Unlimited data on 1st line; 2GB data on 2nd line; 2GB data on Mobile Hotspot
Total cost came to $160/month.
The new Share Everything plan:
- Unlimited shared minutes
- Unlimited shared text
- 2GB of shared data
Total cost came to $140/month. Definitely worth it.
I’ve calculated that we use less than 1GB of data combined per month, so I’ve opted for the 2GB plan for now, but it’s only $10 more to upgrade to 4GB or $20 more to upgrade to 6GB.
Another interesting thing for tablet users is that the monthly line access fee is $10 (instead of the $40 for smartphones). So you can add a iPad to your plan for $10 and it’ll share your data allotment. I always found $30/month to get 3G access to your iPad to be excessive, but for $10, it might not be that bad.