Verzon will follow Sprint in raising prices of SMS text messaging.
Starting on March 1st, Verizon customers not paying for a messaging
bundle will pay fifteen cents per message to send and receive messages
in and to the U.S., Puerto Rico, Canada, and Mexico, while receiving an
international message will cost fifteen cents regardless of any
messaging bundles the customer is paying for. It remains to be seen if
Verizon will be allowing people out of their contracts, or even
consider this as a material change to service.
Update: A reporter from MobileTracker has posted a section of the Verizon contract that states if a customer is affected by the change, they can can cancel the affected service with no fee, but will not be allowed out of the contract without a termination fee. However, like such actions on Sprint and Cingular, it is not clear that messaging is a service included with a rate plan or not.
Using the same terminology on Sprint and Cingular yielded different results; Sprint was willing to waive the termination fee, Cingular in general was not.
