I was just looking at rumored pricing for Verizon Wireless' impending shift to tiered data pricing posted over at Androidpolice.com. "Rumored" is the key word here, but still the numbers the site came up with didn't appear to be too much of a stretch. The report puts 2GB at $30 per month, 5GB at $50 per month, 10 GB fetches $80 per month and overages will cost $10 per GB.

That's pretty much in line with what we're seeing from AT&T ($25 per 2GB, $45 4GB). T-Mobile USA chose the throttling route, where customers who exceed their $20 2GB expenditure get thrown into slow gear, but on the whole we're looking at a rough average of about $10 per GB of 3G data in the United States.

In the short term, these caps won't mean much to the majority of wireless customers. When AT&T made the switch to tiered pricing, AT&T Mobility chief executive Ralph de la Vega was quick to point out that the changes would only adversely affect about 3 percent of the company's customers, namely "data hogs." As I said, in the “short term” that's probably true. Just to verify this, I went into my AT&T account and took a look at my data usage. I hadn't cracked 1 GB during any single month on my iPhone 4 in the past four months, and I'm on my phone pretty regularly.

Still, I haven't given up my unlimited plan yet. The cards appear stacked against the user given the push to host and stream content from the cloud, as well as the increasing size of photos and videos that end-users create, setting up the perfect storm of data usage. It seems like uploading even a short compressed 3D video to the cloud is going to burn through a good bit of a user's monthly allowance.

I've generally resigned myself on the AT&T-T-Mobile merger. It seems inevitable, but it narrows an already small field of players, which could lead to even less competitive data pricing than we have right now. To be sure, I don't even think we need rumors about where VZW will fix its tiered data plans. One need only look at the incredibly “coincidental,” and equally outrageous, price of per-usage SMS in the past to get a sense of the wireless industry’s taste, or lack thereof, for competition in pricing. Back in 2009, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless all raised their per-text price from 10 to 20 cents in a span of three years, drawing anti-trust scrutiny from the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights.

Carriers are done with unlimited data plans; that's clear. Even Dan Hesse admitted at a recent investor conference that he wasn't sure how long Sprint could continue to offer unlimited data and remain competitive. But what's concerning will be the lack of players that can push prices lower as more content is created, hosted in the cloud and streamed to various devices. Add to that equation tablets, hotspots and embedded laptops and consumers are being asked to spend an awful lot of dough to meet their data requirements at current prices.

Regardless of how little data I'm using right now, Cisco's recently published Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update (2010–2015) has made me think twice before downgrading the unlimited plan on my AT&T iPhone 4. Cisco says it expects the average traffic per smartphone to increase by 1,272 percent by 2015, which means that if I'm using 1 GB of data per month now, I'll be using right around 12 GB of data in 2015. At current prices, that’s right around $110-$120 just in data for my smartphone.

Granted, data prices should come down with demand, but how far once we’re down to only one GSM nationwide carrier in this country?

I'm not naive enough to believe AT&T will still allow me my unlimited plan in 2015, but until the carrier yanks it out from under me, I think I'll hang onto it just to be on the safe side. Besides, I still have to wait and see what effects iCloud has on my data usage, right?