Droid Life is reporting that starting July 7th Verizon will join AT&T in charging for tiered data plans.  The plans for new Verizon customers will be:

Data plans:

• 2GB – $30/month
• 5GB – $50/month
• 10GB – $80/month

If you would like to add tethering on to any of those packages, you can purchase 2GB of data at an additional cost of $20 per month.

Data plans w/ tethering:

• 4GB – $50/month
• 7GB – $70/month
• 12GB – $100/month

If you go over your purchased amount of data, it will cost you $10 per 1GB.

The good news for existing customers is that if you already have a $30 unlimited data plan you will be grandfathered in and can keep that plan even when upgrading to new phones.

For comparison here are AT&T’s tiered plans:

• 200MB – $15/month
• 2GB – $25/month
• 4GB – $45/month

Verizon and AT&T try to justify these plans by saying that the majority of consumers use less than 2GB of data so your prices will either stay the same or go down.  While that may have been true for most people 2 years ago, more and more popular apps are using increased data.  Netflix, Pandora, Rdio, Slacker, BeyondPod, Slingbox, Audible…they are all apps that either stream or download large amounts of data and it would not take long to reach 2GB in a month.  Even the major players Google, Apple, and Amazon are contributing to this with their cloud music services.  These services offer the advantage of not having music stored on your phone but the disadvantage of now streaming all of that music from the cloud…in other words using more of your now limited data supply.

This is another reason why I’m happy to be a T-Mobile customer.  T-Mobile offers a truly unlimited data plan, although if you reach 5GB of data usage in a month they will “throttle” my data usage.  How much will my data connection be slowed down?  I can’t say because I’ve never actually reached 5GB in a month.  This is another reason why I don’t want AT&T buying out T-Mobile.  I guess when the time comes if this deal does happen I’ll look into Sprint and see what they have to offer at that time.