Well, it was good while it lasted… Verizon Communications CFO Fran Shammo pretty much dug the graves for grandfathered unlimited plans today, announcing that come mid-summer, all customers will be taken off their unlimited data life support and moved to a new data-share plan in the sky.

“Everyone will be on data share”, according to Shammo

We all knew this day would come, I just wasn’t expecting it so soon. These new data-share plans are supposed to be more beneficial for both carriers and consumers, but I’m guessing the benefit really leans towards the former rather than the latter. I am, however, interested to see what kind of pricing and data allotments these new data-share plans are going to have — only then will I be able to see whether or not there’s a benefit.

I believe nothing has been set in stone, as Fran Shammo goes on to say while this is the design, it’s still only on paper:

Well, the way we have designed this and of course, it is paper, not actual and we will see how this comes out, but the way we have designed this is we really shouldn’t see a short-term decline. And really the theory behind this is LTE is our anchor point for data share. So as you come through an upgrade cycle and you upgrade in the future, you will have to go onto the data share plan. And moving away from, if you will, the unlimited world and moving everybody into a tiered structure data share-type plan.

So when you think about our 3G base, a lot of our 3G base is unlimited. As they start to migrate into 4G, they will have to come off of unlimitedand go into the data share plan. And that is beneficial for us for many reasons, obviously. So as you pick what tier you want to be and we think that there will be some price up in those tiers.

I’ve recently dropped the data plan on both my wife and daughter’s phones because my monthly bill is simply outrageous. Hopefully these new data-share plans will allow me to bump their phones back up, because we really would like to use all the features of a smartphone, unfortunately they’re just too expensive at this point.

If you’re still on an unlimited grandfathered plan, you might as well suck up as much data as you can in the coming months, because come summer, they’ll most likely go the way of the dinosaur.

• SourceVerizon