Verizon to improve prepaid offerings

We’ve stayed rather mum on Verizon’s prepaid offerings, mainly because, beyond the $1 per day access fee, they’re rather unremarkable. So rather than harping on the access fee (which sucks big time), we just kind of left their prepaid division alone and focused on their (sometimes shady) business dealings. However, news has come from marketing chief Mike Lanman that the company plans to overhaul their prepaid services over the next month, with a hope to make them available by November. Yes, Verizon is actually catering to a market that doesn’t sign their lives away. We checked ourselves for a fever just now, to make sure we weren’t hallucinating, and no, we’re fine. The exact details of the overhaul were not mentioned by Lanman, though he did say that it wouldn’t be flat-rate unlimited (clearly; that would make no sense). His quote on the matter:

“We want to address a broader range of the prepaid market than we do today,” he told Reuters. “We have very happy customers in the mid range … There are customers that have infrequent usage that we’d like to address and there are customers that have higher volume requirements that we’ll address.”

So we’re figuring that means an axe to the access fee. Maybe they’ll do an AT&T-esque deal, where you opt-in to the access fee in exchange for cheaper per-minute rates. It’s not the best solution, but it’s a marked improvement over their current deal and their paltry rate plans. Another topic Lanman discussed was mobile advertising. It appears you won’t be seeing much from Verizon in that regard in the near future:

“We’re going to be very smart and talk to our customers about what they want,” he said.

Honestly, what I want is to be able to sue your ass if you do wrong by me. I want to not be bound by your stifling contract. Best quote, though:

“We’ll make it easy for the customer. We’ll develop the relationships and the customers will select which relationships they’re interested in,” Lanman said.

So now they’re calling advertisements “relationships.” Wonderful. Yet another term to soothe the masses. Ugh. We hate Verizon. [Reuters]]]>