T-Mobile has said it plans to offer shared data pools to its business customers, and on Friday Sprint officially began selling buckets of communal data to its small business customers. The plans are only available through its business sales channels and support a maximum of 30 LTE smartphones, tablets and data modems. Like AT&T and Verizon, Sprint is charging a monthly per-device fee, for instance $40 for a smartphone with unlimited talk and text included. The pricing of the data plans themselves start at $140 a month for 20 GB split between up to 10 devices. At the high end is a 60 GB / $320 plan supporting up 30 lines.

Sprint is also offering a set of shared plans targeting data-only tablets and modems — an interesting use case brought on by the BYOD trend. As employees make their personal smartphones their business handsets, companies may opt to make the tablet or a wirelessly connected laptop the only mobile work tool available to their employees. Sprint is charging $10 a month to connect a tablet, $20 to connect a modem, and offering shared data plans starting at $60 for 10 GB and topping out at 60 GB for $320.

Since last summer Sprint’s mantra has been “Say no to sharing data,” and it has launched advertising and web campaigns that attempted to show how consumers could save money by adopting its individual unlimited plans. Both Sprint and T-Mobile have maintained that not only do subscribers get a better deal with their unlimited plans, but also THAT the lack of A cap makes everything so much simpler.

Why the change of heart when it comes to business plans then? Likely, Sprint and T-Mobile are realizing that the same arguments that work with consumers aren’t going to work with businesses. Small companies value simplicity as well, but they’re willing to take on some complexity if it means saving some cash each month. And on account with 20 or 30 devices, those savings could be substantial.

Buying two unlimited plans at $30 a month for unlimited data might make sense for a family of two, but paying $500 to $600 a month to attach 20 smartphones to the unlimited spigot makes little sense if you can buy an enormous bucket of gigabytes for half the cost. Keep in mind, as well, that neither T-Mobile or Sprint offer unlimited plans for tablets or modems, so any business owner connecting anything besides smartphones would have had to manage caps under the old pricing plans anyway.

I don’t think Sprint and T-Mobile are swallowing the data-sharing pill just yet. For them unlimited is still a key differentiator in the consumer market, but they are likely very concerned that Verizon and AT&T will steal their business customers with these new shared pricing models. That has forced them to respond in kind.

In Sprint’s case at least, it isn’t just responding, it’s attacking. Sprint’s new plans undercut Verizon’s recently launched small business tiers. For instance, Verizon is charging $375 a month for 50 GB of shared data between, while Sprint is offering 60 GB for $350. Sprint and T-Mobile may be forced to play the data share game, but it looks like they’re going to maintain their reputations for offering cheaper service.

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On Jan. 20, Boost Mobile, one of Sprint’s prepaid brands, will start throttling its so-called unlimited plans after customers surpass 2.5 GB a month, according to a company Facebook post first spotted by FierceWireless. Sprint’s unlimited contract plans will remain unthrottled – a strategy CEO Dan Hesse has stressed is key to differentiating Sprint from the competition – but now both of Sprint’s primary prepaid services, Virgin and Boost, will have usage restrictions.

Broadband Reports confirmed that Clearwire is now experimenting with usage-based pricing plans in 10 cities, selling customers 2 GB a month for $20, 4 GB for $40 or an unlimited package for $60. The 10-city trial aside, all of Clearwire’s current plans are marketed as unlimited, but many customers have complained that throttling policies have kicked in at seemingly arbitrary usage levels.

It’s not clear whether the WiMAX operator maintains those same throttling policies on the new more expensive “unlimited” plan, but considering many Clearwire customers use the service as their primary residential broadband connection, it’s likely throttling will remain in play.

True unlimited plans are becoming harder and harder to come by. AT&T and Verizon both began throttling their grandfathered unlimited customers last year, though neither has set a specific soft cap. New customers have no choice but to choose a tiered or family share plan (in Verizon’s case shared plans are really the only option).

MetroPCS has kept an unlimited plan, though it raised its price. T-Mobile is the one bright spot for unlimited enthusiasts. After getting rid of its unlimited plans last year, it reintroduced them this summer, but they do come with more restrictions than its soft-capped plans, for instance: no using your phone as a hotspot.

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Customers can bring their total monthly data allotments to 1 GB via two means: by adding other FreedomPop subscribers to the carrier’s internal social network of users and through special promotional offers such as filling out an online survey or watching a video ad. The social element, however, isn’t a mere referral service in which you get a one-time bonus for bringing a new customer to the network. You keep receiving the 10-MB per-person bonus as long as your contacts remain active subscribers to the network (and they remain your friends).

Right now there is a limit to how much freebie data a customer can earn, capped at 500 GB. But according to FreedomPop COO Steven Sesar, FreedomPop eventually plans to ease that restriction. Sesar said FreedomPop will not only allow customers to rack up data bonuses from more friends, but it will overlay onto its social platform more value-added services, the of use of which will also accrue extra megabytes. One of the ideas FreedomPop has in the works is its own VoIP service. Eventually customers will be able to trade data like currency, allocating unused megabytes to friends.

We’ve already detailed many of the aspects of FreedomPop’s unique freemium business model and its wholesale relationships with Clearwire and Sprint. However more specifics on its plans and pricing emerged for this week’s launch:

• FreedomPop is offering customers two modems: a mobile hotspot and USB dongle. Both devices are technically free though customers have to put down a $49-$89 deposit, but it’s fully refundable. The company will begin selling sleeve modems that fit over the iPod Touch and iPhone 4 and 4S in coming weeks.
• Though FreedomPop isn’t limiting what you consume with your free data allotment, it is putting restrictions on how fast you consume it. Though the specific details aren’t spelled out on its website, it appears non-paying customers won’t have access to the WIMAX network’s full mobile broadband speeds. FreedomPop is selling a “Speed Plus” service for $3 a month, which doesn’t throttle speeds and prioritizes packets over those of non-paying customers.
• Apart from the Speed Plus plan, FreedomPop is selling two prepaid data plans both of which undercut the prices charged by the major operators. The first comes with 2 GB of data for $18 a month, while the second has 4 GB for $29 a month. Customers on those plans pay 1 cent for each megabyte of overage, while on the free and $3 plans customers pay 2 cents for each additional megabyte.
• The beta is open to all comers, but FreedomPop has an upper limit to the number of customers it will accept. Sesar wouldn’t identify the specific number, saying only it was restricted to the number of devices the MVNO has in inventory.
• Another reason for limiting subscribers in the beta is that FreedomPop can’t yet offer nationwide service. Since it’s solely using Clearwire’s WiMAX at launch, it’s limited to that operator’s 4G footprint, which covers roughly one-third of the US population.
• Next year, FreedomPop will switch wholesale partners, trading Clearwire’s WiMAX for Sprint’s new LTE network. Sprint’s 4G service won’t be complete at that point either, but FreedomPop will also tap into Sprint’s 3G CDMA network giving it near nationwide coverage.

Most interestingly, FreedomPop isn’t restricting customers to a single device. Seras said that he expects families and even some individual subscribers to sign up for two or more devices, and each device will get access to its own separate free 500 MB allotment.

The potential for abuse, though, is obvious. A customers could order multiple devices and spread his or her monthly usage among them. That customer could even rack up more free data on each device by making each device “friend” the others on FreedomPop’s social network. Sesar, however, said FreedomPop will restrict that kind of behavior and will shut off customers that have too many devices linked to a single account or credit card.

Sign image courtesy of Flickr user frankh

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According to an MIT Technology Review report, they’re not, and as you might expect the discrepancy in byte counts come out in the operators’ favor. The carriers aren’t exactly sticking their thumb on the scale, but they’re billing you for all data they ship you, rather than the data you actually receive, UCLA computer scientist Chunyi Peng told the Review.

Peng and her research group built a custom app for Android that counts bytes actually received on the device and then tested it over two unnamed U.S. operators’ networks. They were billed for 450 MB of data that they didn’t actually consume. Over a typical phone, carriers tend to over-count data by between 5 percent and 7 percent – not a huge number, but a significant one if it pushes you over your cap, triggering either an automatic overage fee or throttling policies that limit your speeds, Peng concluded.

The reason for the discrepancy has to do with where carriers count data. Peng explained to the Review that carriers start tracking usage as it leaves the network core, not when it actually hits the phone. The problem is the fickleness of mobile connections means customers often move in and out of coverage or experience dips and spikes in bandwidth. Not all data requested actually makes it to the phone, but the carriers still charge you for the delivery attempt. The issue is particularly bad with audio and video streams, which keep on coming even if the radio link to the phone disappears.

Considering that video is expected to be the biggest growth driver in mobile data, this problem is only to get worse. Consumers have every right be upset. It’s true carriers are making the effort to deliver that data, and it’s arriving all the way up the base station. But that’s hardly a justification for over-counting. If the network is too congested or cellular coverage is lost that’s ultimately the responsibility falls on the carrier, not the consumer.

Interestingly, Peng and her team also found away to bypass the data toll booth, by disguising application traffic as DNS requests that don’t count against plans’ data buckets – at least on the two operators tested. Peng told the Review that she was able to create an app that exploited that policy racking up 200 MB of data usage that went uncounted on her bill.

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LTE isn’t just a faster technology, it’s a more efficient technology – carriers can pack a lot more bandwidth into any given chunk of spectrum with LTE than they can with older generation technologies. While many of you will laugh at this next statement, the large-scale adoption of LTE will make mobile data cheaper. It won’t happen immediately, and yes, most carriers will resist lowering prices with every fiber of their being, but it will happen. That’s simply the way competition works.

By 2013 we’ll have four nationwide carriers with LTE networks. Given all four LTE networks will have the same ingrained data-delivery efficiencies, it’s only a matter of time before one uses that advantage to start slashing per-gigabyte rates, thus setting off a price war. The carriers may not be saints, but they’re not idiots either. If they can halve their data plan pricing and still make a profit, they will – they just need competitive pressure to help that decision along.

Furthermore, the move from 3G to LTE isn’t a one-time bonus. LTE will beget LTE-Advanced. LTE-Advanced will beget new network topologies like small cells and heterogeneous networks (HetNets) all aimed at pumping gobs of cheap localized capacity into the network. The industry will add more parallel antennas to devices and towers, carriers will design their systems so phones can connect to multiple towers, even multiple networks simultaneously, and interference coordination technology will allow cells to be grouped together in huge clusters without canceling out each others’ signals.

With each new 4G iteration, networks will enjoy accompanying boost in capacity and efficiency. The costs of planning and deploying these networks will be enormous, but so will then increase in bandwidth available to any given subscriber. The same operational cost that goes into delivering a gigabyte of data today will deliver 10 GBs in the next few years. Ten years down the road 100 GBs could be delivered for the same price.

Why Apple is critical to this transformation

Without Apple embracing LTE that shift to cheaper mobile data isn’t going happen. Yes, LTE networks have started popping up all over the world without Apple’s help, but carriers can’t realize their operational efficiencies until they move the majority of their traffic and devices onto those new 4G networks.

The iPhone’s data hunger is ravenous. Network optimization and analytics firm Arieso estimates that the introduction of each new generation of iPhone produces a 40 percent increase in traffic over a carrier’s mobile network. If the iPhone 5’s data deluge doesn’t hit a new LTE network, it doesn’t just evaporate — it floods onto carriers’ 3G networks.

By placing even more burden on 3G, carriers would be forced to keep investing in them their legacy networks. Instead of plowing their billions of investment dollars into 4G networks, they would have to add more 3G capacity and devote more spectrum to maintaining older technologies. And once those investments are made, they’re sunk. Any megahertz devoted to 3G is going to remain 3G for the foreseeable future.

In Europe and other regions of the world behind the mobile broadband curve, a sans-LTE iPhone lessens the urgency to deploy the newest network technologies. If your single best selling smartphone model for the next nine months doesn’t support 4G, why should you? Android handset makers like Samsung should be lauded for their efforts in propping up the LTE ecosystem, but Apple was the missing, critical strut. (For a more detailed analysis of Apple’s impact on LTE check out my GigaOM Pro report on the topic, though a subscription is required).

If Apple failed to produce a 4G iPhone, LTE’s progress – and the progression toward cheaper data – would have been hindered, not just for another twelve months but possibly several years. What radios the in the iPhone includes have a big impact on CTOs’ network decisions and CFOs capital investment decisions for the next year. The wireless industry isn’t the internet industry. These are big iron deployments we’re talking about, and those decisions have long-term consequences.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better

Unfortunately, carriers have taken advantage of transition from 3G to 4G to pull some pricing shenanigans. Verizon and AT&T both recently launched shared data plans, which lets their customers pool their devices into a single plan (a good thing), but also forces customers to double down on the voice and SMS services they’ve long been abandoning (a bad thing).

Wireless Intelligence’s global breakdown of LTE subscribers

In Europe, there are indications that carriers will charge a premium for LTE access following the logic that faster connection speeds demand higher rates. It looks like carriers are milking their new investments for all they are worth, which is hardly surprising to many observers of the mobile industry. But I don’t think any of these business models are sustainable in the long-term.

It won’t be AT&T or Verizon, but we have two other nationwide operators in the US with plenty of initiative. Sprint has already extended its unlimited smartphone data plans to LTE where its customers can do far more damage than over its old CDMA networks. T-Mobile hasn’t yet released its pricing plans for LTE, but you can bet it will either match or discount the already cheap buckets of HSPA+ data it offers today (while T-Mobile didn’t get the iPhone today, it’s inevitable it will land the device). At that point we can leave it up to the market to do its work.

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Before you get too excited there is one big caveat: you are not allowed to tether your smartphone or use it as a mobile hotspot. T-Mobile’s not crazy. It doesn’t want to open up its network to the full brunt of the PC-and tablet-driven internet. But whatever you can do on your smartphone — short of sharing your connection — is fair game: Netflix, YouTube, massive file sharing, you name it. According to T-Mobile, it won’t throttle or cap.

Director of Marketing Harry Thomas said T-Mobile is revisiting the unlimited plan simply because that’s what its customers want. The issue wasn’t megabyte stinginess –- T-Mobile already offers the biggest buckets of smartphone data for the cheapest prices in the U.S. with the exception of Sprint. Instead, T-Mobile is targeting the customer that frets over his monthly data consumption -– the one that worries about whether he can still download a video or stream music without breaching his data cap, Thomas said.

“We’re going where our customers are leading us, and unlimited is where they’re telling us to go,” Thomas said.

The unlimited plans will come in two flavors depending on whether you paid for your phone up front or took advantage of one of T-Mo’s subsidized devices. Value plan — or unsubsidized –- customers pay $20 a month, while classic –- subsidized –- customers pay $30. The value plan is pretty much the cheapest data plan in wireless data among the nationwide operators. Sprint’s unlimited plans cost $30 and are still restricted primarily to its 3G CDMA network, while T-Mobile offers much faster HSPA+ speeds in 229 markets. At AT&T, $20 will get you a measly 300 MB, while Verizon Wireless has stopped selling individual data plans entirely.

T-Mobile is keeping its metered plans in place for customers that do want to use their phone’s hotspot capabilities. Ironically, that means you would pay more for a 5-GB plan ($25 for value, $35 for classic) than you would for an unlimited one.

A lot of people in this industry have opined — myself among them — that the unlimited data plan is endangered species, an untenable business model in a world where mobile capacity is so constrained. But Thomas said T-Mobile believes that unlimited is still a viable strategy. It’s not a limited promotion or some loss-leading pricing gimmick to stem its customer losses, he said: T-Mobile expects to make money off these plans.

That’s a bold statement coming from T-Mobile considering just how much data its customers consume. The carrier recently revealed that its average smartphone customer eats up 760 MB a month, far higher than the industry average. On its 42-Mbps dual-carrier HSPA+ network that number increases to a whopping 1.3 GB a month.

If Thomas is right about unlimited being a viable business for T-Mobile, then that raises a very interesting question: If unlimited can work for T-Mobile, why can’t it work it for AT&T and Verizon?

T-Mobile image courtesy of Flickr user swruler9284; Buffet image courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

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The Verge confirmed with store representatives that the policy change will start Monday, and in fact, AT&T’s $35/3 GB contract tablet plan has disappeared from its website. AT&T only subsidized Android slates, not the iPad, so the impact won’t be huge. AT&T also isn’t the only operator to dump tablet subsidies. Verizon did so in June when it launched its shared data plans. But these policy changes are significant.

As my colleague Tom Krazit points out smartphones are fundamentally different devices than tablets. While mobile data connectivity is the smartphone’s primary reason for existing, cellular broadband is a secondary consideration for customers investing in a coffee-table computer. Consumers have shown they’re willing to pay the tablet’s steep price tag, but they’ve shown less willingness to invest in expensive mobile data plans and long-term contracts when Wi-Fi is so readily available.

By eliminating tablet subsidies, AT&T is discarding the $5 a month surcharge on tablets and pretty much normalizes data pricing across individual smartphone and tablet plans. AT&T customers will soon offer customers two choices: sign up for an individual no-contract plan (250 MB/$15, 3 GB/$30, or 5 GB/$50), or for one of its forthcoming shared data plans, which allows customers to add a tablet to pooled data bucket for an additional $10 a month.

But AT&T should go one step further. Now that customers are paying the full costs of their slates, Ma Bell should charge less for tablet data than it does for smartphone data. Here’s why: Subsidies aren’t traditional discounts or sale; they work much more like mortgages. Carriers give you an expensive device at a low up-front cost, but recover the subsidy through premiums factored into your plans over the next two years. If there’s no subsidy then it stands to reason customers shouldn’t pay those higher rates. T-Mobile has already adopted this approach, charging much cheaper data and voice rates to customers who bring their own devices.

I won’t pick on AT&T too much. Ma Bell is actually the most progressive (or least regressive) operator when it comes to tablet data plan pricing. In a recent analysis of U.S. carrier data plans, we found that AT&T had the cheapest per-gigabyte rates for tablets and mobile broadband than any carrier. Even T-Mobile’s new discounted value plans are in some cases more expensive than AT&T’s regular rates. For the same $30 price AT&T charges for 3 GB a month, T-Mobile only gives you 2 GB.

Operators are beginning to realize that tablet subsidies aren’t the way to go. Now they need to eliminate legacy subsidy pricing models. AT&T and Verizon’s shared data will solve the problem in part by allowing customers to draw tablet and smartphone data from a common pool – though they have other problems. But operators really want the tablet revolution to occur over their networks and not over Wi-Fi, they need to make tablet data cheaper.

Approved photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Stuart Miles

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Verizon’s plans went into effect last month, and they are mandatory for all new customers. Current subscribers on Verizon’s individual tiered data plans can keep their rates for the time being, but customers grandfathered into Verizon’s old unlimited plans will have a tough choice to make when they upgrade to their next devices: They can either pay full retail cost for the phone or chose between a shared or tiered individual plan.

AT&T’s shared plans will take effect in late August, though it hasn’t revealed an exact date. AT&T’s will be purely optional for new and existing customers.

First, you need to select a data bucket. The following prices are for shared data between any number of devices either directly connected to the carriers network or tethered via Wi-Fi or cable. For instance if you buy a 6 GB bucket, all of your devices will draw from the monthly 6 GB pool. If you go over that allotment both carriers charge $15 for every additional gigabyte.

Now that you’ve got your data, select the number and types of devices you and your family will use. The reason for the different rates for smartphones, modems, tablets and feature phones is due to the fact that both AT&T and Verizon bundle in unlimited SMS and voice with each device. Feature phones make lots of phone calls and send lots of text messages while tablets do not. Why both carriers are discriminating between the all-data connectivity of a modem versus a tablet is beyond me, but they do.

All of these prices are per device so if you have both a tablet and a feature phone, your monthly device connection fee will be $40, the total of the $10 slate fee and the $30 phone fee. If it’s four smartphones, Verizon will charge you $160. As you’ve probably noticed, AT&T’s smartphone fees are variable, depending on the size of the shared data bucket you buy. That brings us to our next chart.

AT&T charges less to connect smartphones if you invest in more data. That may seem like it gives AT&T a big advantage over Verizon, but in most cases Big Red charges lower rates for the data itself. Whether you save money on one carrier versus the other depends on which combination of devices and plan you sign up for.

Take the individual user with a single smartphone that wants to use his phone as a mobile hotspot. A moderate user just looking for basic connectivity could sign up for an AT&T 1 GB plan and pay $95 $85 a month, while the same plan on Verizon would cost $100 $90. However, if that same single-smartphone customer committed to 4 GBs, the carriers would offer the same price point, $110 a month. And if he bumped up usage to 10 GB a month, Verizon comes out on top charging $140 versus AT&T’s $150.

When you start adding more devices to the plan, the numbers get more complicated. An AT&T plan with four smartphones costs $240 compared to Verizon’s price of $260. But if that same data plan connected two smartphones and two tablets, you’d pay the same rate on both carriers, $200.

It’s not a hard and fast rule, but in general if you’re looking to connect more smartphones, AT&T comes out on top, but if maxing out data usage or connecting a lot of non-smartphone devices is important to you, Verizon’s plans fare better.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

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Verizon’s structure is pretty simple. Pay a per-device monthly fee ranging from $10 for a tablet to $40 for a smartphone and then buy a bucket of data starting at $50 for 1 GB and going up to $100 for 10 GB. AT&T, however, is using a sliding scale to determine the amount your charged for each smartphone. For instance a family buying a 1 GB plan would pay $45 per smartphone connected, while the same family would pay only $40 per phone if they signed up for a 4 GB plan.

In general, the prices AT&T charges for the actual data buckets start off cheaper than Verizon’s equivalents, but as you get into the upper tiers, Verizon starts offering better volume discounts. For instance at 6 GB, Verizon charges $80 while AT&T charges $90. But at that tier AT&T is charging a $35 per-device fee. So four smartphones sharing 6 GB plans costs roughly $230 a month, while the same setup on Verizon costs $240. If you move down to two smartphones sharing 6 GB though, both carriers’ prices wind up being the same, $160.

Both carriers are charging the same rates for connecting non-smartphone devices and customer overages are being billed at the same rate: $15 per gigabyte. The new Mobile Share plans will be available in late August.

The biggest shocker is that AT&T is making these plans strictly optional – and not just for existing customers. New customers can still sign up for the revised individual data plans AT&T implemented in January – which in the case of individual customers could wind up being the cheaper option by far. And don’t worry, unlimited customers, your plans remained grandfathered.

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T-Mobile is still offering “classic” and “value” plans, with the latter charging cheaper rates to customers that buy or bring their own devices. But T-Mobile is further subdividing those categories into consumer and business plans. The consumer plans are subject to T-Mobile’s normal soft caps, meaning speeds will be throttled back when customers reach their monthly data allotments. The business plans, however, won’t be throttled. Instead, overage fees ranging from 2 to 10 cents a megabyte will kick in when the hard cap is exceeded. That works out to $20/gigabyte for higher tiers (expensive, but not entirely unreasonable), but scales up to $100/gigabyte for the 500 MB plan (essentially highway robbery).

While any customer can buy either plan, T-Mobile said the overage-fee plans are targeted at business customers who need to keep their high-speed data connections at all times. There’s an advantage to signing up for hard-capped data though: the business plans are between $3 and $5 cheaper than their consumer counterparts.

Apart from introducing the new 500 MB tier — which costs between $20 and 30 depending on the plan — T-Mobile has also tinkered with its existing plan pricing, adjusting some rates upwards and others downward. For instance, you’ll now pay $2 less if you sign up for a classic 2 GB plan ($38/month), but you’ll pay $2 more than you would have previously if you take the equivalent value plan ($32/month).

The end result is that T-Mobile’s value plans are becoming slightly more expensive, which runs counter to its stated policy of driving more customers to an unsubsidized handset model. T-Mobile also launched new prepaid pricing plans last month.

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