So Much Excitement Over Cutting Super Expensive EV-DO To Just Expensive

The buzz in the wireless world over the weekend was focused on the rumors, from Reuters, that Verizon Wireless would cut the price on their EV-DO broadband wireless data offering from $80 for unlimited use to $60 for unlimited use. The timing isn't surprising. Sprint is launching their competing EV-DO offering "any day now," and planned to offer it at the "industry standard" price of $80/month. So, while Alltel's lower EV-DO price failed to make Verizon Wireless care, the threat of Sprint seems to have woken them up. Of course, $60/month is still quite high (and Verizon Wireless might want to think about lowering their 1xRTT price as well), but without too much competition it doesn't seem likely to happen. Sprint and Verizon Wireless can jockey against each other for a while, but both have the incentive to keep the price somewhat high, until other options come along -- which won't be for some time. Of course, you could make the argument that they should drop the floor on these prices significantly in a landgrab effort to sign up as many (long contract) customers as soon as possible before there's real competition, but it seems that they're still not confident that the system could really handle the bandwidth that such a landgrab would require. Update: This report from the San Jose Mercury News seems to indicate that the cheaper plan is only if you have a Verizon Wireless voice plan as well.

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