AT&T, Sprint, Verizon mull a big wireless data shift : Carriers to embrace usage-based mobile data plans

Settle in for the hangover, folks, because the unlimited mobile data party might well end in 2010. While Americans have been enjoying the giddy, anytime, anywhere use of the Internet, social media, cloud-based picture-sharing and streaming video, revenue per megabyte has been falling for operators. And that means we are likely to soon see the end of flat-rate mobile data pricing, across carriers.

“We believe carriers will increasingly have to manage the usage side of the equation,” said Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi, who explains that bandwidth consumption since the introduction of the iPhone has grown by 50-fold, while data revenues have grown by only 250 percent. “Carriers that have not already done so are increasingly likely to adopt usage-based pricing schemes that more fairly match price to usage but which will also inevitably discourage the most profligate kinds of applications...”