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Verizon raises upgrade fee to $30, sets 200GB limit on unlimited data plans

Verizon raises upgrade fee to $30, sets 200GB limit on unlimited data plans

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Last week during CES, Verizon quietly increased its upgrade fee from $20 up to $30. This charge is applied whenever a customer either buys a phone outright or splits payments up monthly with Verizon’s device payment plans.

Those are pretty much the only valid ways to buy phones from Verizon at this point, since the company also got rid of two-year contracts last week — this time for good. Subsidized contract pricing had remained available to existing customers after being phased out for new subscribers in 2015. (The upgrade fee had been an even more expensive $40 for contract customers.) The $30 upgrade fee is separate from the activation fee that Verizon applies whenever you set up a new line of service.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere blasted Verizon for the change last week, but it’s not like his own company doesn’t sneak this stuff in: T-Mobile charges anyone not upgrading via Jump and Jump On Demand a $20 “assisted services fee” when upgrading in stores or through customer support. (Buying online avoids the fee.) AT&T and Sprint also have upgrade fees of their own, so it’s an industry-wide practice that’s usually justified with vague and super generic explanations. “These fees help cover increased cost to provide customers with America’s largest and fastest 4G LTE network,” Verizon told Ars Technica when asked about the latest increase. A request for greater specificity didn’t do much; Verizon added only that the upgrade fee goes towardsongoing costs to maintain and enhance the network,

Separately, Verizon has recently been communicating to employees the threshold it’s using to decide when grandfathered unlimited data customers are hogging up an unfair share of the network: it’s 200GB, according to Droid Life. Customers who exceed an average of 200GB monthly will be ordered to switch to one of Verizon’s tiered data buckets. Failing that, their lines will be disconnected entirely. Apparently Verizon would rather get rid of a customer than deal with them gobbling up hundreds of gigabytes. Customers notified they’ve crossed the line in January must switch to a new Verizon plan by February 16th.