In a Thursday interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York, John Killian, chief financial officer of Verizon Communications, the parent company of Verizon Wireless, revealed that the carrier may follow AT&T’s strategy; and do away with unlimited data plans in favor of tiered pricing.

Noting that Verizon Wireless – the biggest carrier of mobile phones in the US – will shift to its faster fourth-generation (4G) network technology, Killian said: “We will probably need to change the design of our pricing where it will not be totally unlimited, flat rate.”

With Verizon in the process of finalizing new data plans for the 4G network, which will incorporate data-heavy applications like video downloads; Killian further added that the company expects “explosion in data traffic” once new phones start running on 4G network.

Since 4G will likely provide ten times faster data rates than older networks, analyst Craig Moffett, at New York’s Sanford C. Bernstein & Co, said that more bandwidth the carriers make available, the faster will be its consumption. Going by the current statistics, the Verizon subscribers for smartphones like the Droid and Incredible apparently use between 600 and 800 megabytes of data per month.

As such, voicing the Verizon perspective, Moffett added that the carrier would probably not want “another generation of consumers to be conditioned to the idea that data is always going to be uncapped.”