If you are in education, be you staff, faculty, or student, you probably have a multitude of computing devices. We started with terminals to mainframes and proceeded to desktops, portables, dumb phones, smart phones, notebooks, netbooks, etc. With this progression, the need (or at least the desire) to be able to connect to the net has risen as well, especially as social media usage became of age.

Connecting to the net, however, has primarily been either through a local area network or on a device basis. Wi-Fi provided us the option to jump to and through a LAN to connect. Without the LAN access, we normally paid an individual device access charge and sometimes a data usage charge which was aligned with that particular device. This arrangement is about to change.

Today Verizon announced a new pricing structure with a plan name of “Share Everything”, which will be available starting June 28^th. The core aspects of the plan are paying an access charge per device and one data usage charge across all the devices on a particular account. This makes a lot of sense, both for the carrier and the user, given the proliferation of devices, the increasing usage of social media, the ongoing movement of applications to the cloud, and limited carrier capacity. Others in the industry are expected to follow Verizon’s lead in the general approach of the pricing structure.

With these new plans, connecting the additional devices we use appears to be cheaper and easier. Thus one can expect the proliferation of both devices and social media use to continue, particularly in education.