Verizon has finally decided to give its neglected prepaid offerings some love.
The carrier on Monday announced two new prepaid tiers that will become available on Nov. 13 for increasingly data hungry customers: a $50 per month offering with 5 GB of data and a $70 per month plan that comes with 10 GB of data.
Verizon said the $50 per month plan will come with unlimited talk and text in the United States, unlimited text only to Mexico and Canada, Carry Over Data, Always On Data, a hotspot option, and international messaging. The $70 per month tier will include all of the same with the added bonus of unlimited talk to Mexico and Canada.
Verizon Vice President of Consumer Pricing Rob Miller said the new plans will give consumers “even more data to enjoy all that the next gen network has to offer.”
For customers looking for less data, Verizon said it will still offer its customers a $30 per month Wi-Fi only option, a $45 per month plan with 3 GB of data, and a $60 per month option with 6 GB of data.
The move comes as the carrier looks to up its prepaid game in an industry that is increasingly looking at a combination of pre- and postpaid additions rather than just the latter as its key metric.
In the third quarter, Verizon managed to pull in 83,000 retail prepaid net additions, beating Tier-1 competitor Sprint, which recorded prepaid net losses of 427,000. However, that figure put Verizon well behind both AT&T and T-Mobile, which brought in 304,000 and 684,000 prepaid net additions, respectively.
By comparison, Verizon’s new plans come in at around the same price points as dominant prepaid player T-Mobile’s offerings. The Un-carrier currently offers prepaid customers the choice of a $40 per month plan with 3 GB of data, a $50 per month plan with 5 GB of data, and a $60 per month plan with 10 GB of data. For an extra $5 per month, T-Mobile offers the ability to talk, text, and use data across the United States, Mexico, and Canada. International talk and text is offered as a $15 add-on with those plans.
At the end of October, AT&T’s Cricket prepaid brand boosted the amount of data included in its popular mid-tier plan, bumping its $50 plan from 5 GB of data to 8 GB of data. The carrier also offers a $30 per month package with 1 GB of data, a $40 per month plan with 2.5 GB of data, a $60 tier with 10 GB of data, and a $70 plan with unlimited data.
