Cellular users in the US including myself have had it pretty easy as far as data pricing goes. Granted cell service is probably more expensive than it should be but compared to many other countries, those in the US don’t have much to complain about. The word “unlimited” is thrown around a lot when exploring the terms and conditions of data plans in America, and though they aren’t truly unlimited, they are usually capped at 5GB. Unfortunately Verizon today confirmed our suspicions that the current pricing model is going to change come LTE.

Don’t get discouraged just yet, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said that while tiered pricing will be introduced that actual price per megabyte will be one-half to one-third the current price. When tiered pricing hits I guess we can only hope that said tiers will be reasonably priced. Tiered pricing in theory, could be really great for those users who haven’t followed GuruClark’s tips and simply don’t use much of their allotted data. The only people this will potentially hurt are those users who suck down GBs of data a month.

RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis talked a lot at WES about the “BlackBerry efficiency model” and how RIM’s devices use only a third of the data that other in-market devices do. Perhaps nationwide tiered pricing is what RIM needs to make their devices more compelling to users (and let’s face it, they need all the help they can get). Only time will tell how the whole LTE pricing scheme plays out but for now we have our fingers crossed that we don’t get burned by carriers.

(Via Phone Scoop)