Verizon To Kill Unlimited Data Plan This Month?

AT&T killed its unlimited Internet data plan earlier this year, and now there is buzz Verizon may be following suit.

Engadget writes,

AT&T and Verizon tend to follow each others' moves pretty closely -- the two carriers regard each other as their nearest competitors, after all -- and we're hearing that Big Red intends to move to some sort of tiered bucket strategy on July 29.

There's no word on what the plan might cost, or what different tiered plans would be available.

In a January 2010 interview with the Washington Post, Verizon CTO Dick Lynch hinted that the death of unlimited data plans could be on the horizon.

“The problem we have today with flat-based usage is that you are trying to encourage customers to be efficient in use and applications but you are getting some people who are bandwidth hogs using gigabytes a month and they are paying something like megabytes a month,” he said, adding, “That isn’t long-term sustainable. Why should customers using an average amount of bandwidth be subsidizing bandwidth hogs?"

Now, with the release of the Droid X, it seems Verizon has a new crop of even bigger "bandwidth hogs" to worry about: Thursday, Verizon revealed that early data shows the new Droid X is using five times the data of "any other device."