Expanding the current agreement between the two companies, Verizon Wireless and OnStar said they would launch America’s Choice with OnStar service plans next month, allowing customers to use their Verizon Wireless phones outside vehicles and send calls from their handheld phones to OnStar-embedded in-vehicle phones, with both services on one bill.
The service is expected to launch initially in Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, Detroit and Kansas City, with broader coverage deployments scheduled for later this year.
The calling plans, which will be priced at a $10 premium over the current America’s Choice rate plan offerings, will only be available on OnStar’s recently launched generation-six deployments. Those deployments are in 2004 General Motors SUVs and trucks and are expected to be available for the rest of Onstar’s deployments beginning with 2005 model-year vehicles. The current 2.6 million OnStar customers using analog-based services are not eligible for the service.
In addition to combining calling minutes, the partnership will allow customers to forward calls from their Verizon Wireless handheld phones to their in-vehicle OnStar phones and to set up their Verizon Wireless handsets to ring a certain number of times before forwarding calls into the vehicles.
