Verizon Unveils Wireless Plans That Cover Several Devices

In a first for the wireless industry, Verizon Wireless said that it was introducing plans this month that would allow customers to pay monthly fees to share data, voice minutes and text messages across multiple devices, like smartphones, tablets and notebooks.

The plans include unlimited voice and text messages, but they put limits on the amount of data that customers can use. Verizon’s move is a direct reaction to the trends facing the wireless industry: Customers are using fewer voice minutes and text messages, while mobile data use is on the rise. Here’s how it would work: You choose the devices you want on an account, like your iPhone, your daughter’s cellphone and your son’s iPad. Then you would pick the amount of data you want, ranging from 1 gigabyte to 10 gigabytes. Each device incurs a monthly fee, in addition to the monthly fee for the shared plan. At first glance, that sounds like a bargain, because the typical iPhone user spends upward of $90 a month for an individual plan. But Verizon had previously outlined to investors how these plans would help it make more money. Fran Shammo, Verizon’s chief financial officer, said at a recent investors’ conference that Verizon believed that because its fourth-generation LTE network was faster, people would use it for more heavy data consumption, like streaming video, which would encourage them to eventually buy the more expensive data plans.