Verizon Confirms: Tiered Pricing for LTE Data [but does not say what are the tiers]

Verizon Wireless CEO, Lowell McAdam, said that "the introduction of its LTE network later this year will see the company introduce tiered data plans" and "made it clear that the tiered pricing won’t be as expensive as it sounds" 

Not only that it wont be expensive - "Thanks to the efficiency of LTE, Verizon’s cost per megabyte will be approximately one-third of what they are today. .. LTE will offer further savings to customers, as he expects that all calls made come 2012 will be done via VoIP as opposed to its CDMA network"

Great progress to consumer ethics - the vendor exposes its costs!

See "Verizon confirms tiered pricing for LTE data" - here.

For the VoIP part - Verizon was indeed a pioneer in this highly sensitive space, when it partnered with Skype to provide VoIP, and possibly cannibalize its voice minutes revenues (see "Verizon likes Skype" - here). They may have also seen the recent recommendation from F&S (See "Frost & Sullivan: Mobile Operators Should not Impose Bans or Surcharges to VoIP - here - expecting to see $30B revenues for VoIP over mobile, by 2015, globally).

So what does McAdam mean by "tiered data plans" ?

Just having more volume caps (Verizon has caps today)? maybe they mean a more complex offering that will include QoS aspects (“business class service”) for the Skype/VoIP (compensate somehow for the lost voice revenues), Over the Top Video, on-line gaming, M2M ...

QoS is not necessarily about the volume or speed of data, but aboput setting the priority of traffic in the loaded (if not congested) radio, backhaul, core and peering links. Could this is the reason for using Camiant's (now Tekelec) policy server? (See "Verizon Wireless Selects Camiant for PCRF" - here).