The Carriers are Winning
If Verizon (or any carrier) wants to take this seriously, it’s very simple: let customers add unlimited devices to an existing data bucket for a reasonable monthly fee. $5, for instance. I could even understand $10, perhaps. But $40 for an extra smartphone?
That’s the carriers winning. Why should there be any charge at all for additional devices? If I get 10 GB a month, I get 10 GB a month. It shouldn’t matter what devices (or how many) I use.
By charging so much for each device, they successfully frame the debate around how much they should charge, rather than whether they should charge at all. If there was real competition in the cell phone service market this wouldn’t matter, but unfortunately there’s not.