All four major wireless carriers have been in the news recently concerning unlimited wireless data plans. The unlimited plans get even more intriguing when you consider that the upcoming FCC is likely to be hands off and may allow the carriers to have zero-rating plans. With zero-rating the carriers will give customers unlimited data for the carrier’s own content, but put limits on all other data.
There has also been a lot of talk this year in the industry that people are dropping landline data plans and migrating back to cellphone data. But when you look at the plans available to customers it’s hard to see any of these plans being competitive with good landline data (emphasis on good). Here are the unlimited data plan options of the four big wireless carriers:
Verizon is the easiest to understand and they hate unlimited data plans. They had unlimited plans years ago and worked hard to migrate customers off unlimited data. But about 1% of Verizon customers are still on these plans. The company recently notified customers who actually use their unlimited data that they are going to be disconnected unless they migrate to a suitable plan. And by suitable, the company offers a plan with 100 GB of download for $450 per month. This means that only a customer who doesn’t use their unlimited plan will be allowed to keep it.
AT&T introduced a new unlimited data plan this year, but it has a lot of strings attached. For example, customers of this plan are not allowed to create mobile hotspots for their laptop or tablets. For anybody that travels a lot like me, this is my primary use of mobile data and there are still many hotels around where the bandwidth is barely adequate to read emails. The AT&T unlimited plan also allows the company to throttle customers in two instances – if they are in a congested area or if they exceed 22 GB per month of download. To put that into perspective, my family of three cord-cutters used 660 GB of data last month – so it’s hard to think of 22 GB as ‘unlimited.’ AT&T’s plan is not cheap and costs $60 for the data plus $40 per phone, meaning it costs $100 per month for a single user.
Sprint and T-Mobile both came out with unlimited plans at the end of the summer. Sprint’s ‘Unlimited Freedom’ plan costs $60 for the first line, $40 for the second and $30 per additional line up to ten lines. Sprint’s unlimited plan doesn’t allow HD video and streams all video in standard definition. They also restrict music steaming to 500 kbps and gaming to 2 Mbps.
T-Mobile’s unlimited plan costs $70 for the first user, $50 for the second and $20 after that up for to eight users. T-Mobile is probably the least restrictive of the four companies. Their only restriction on the unlimited data is that they stream video in standard definition. But for $25 more per month customers can get HD video.
The big caveat on all of these plans is that LET data speeds in the US are among the slowest among developed countries. The OpenSignal report this year ranked the US at 55th in the world, placed between Russia and Argentina, at an average speed just under 10 Mbps.
I read a lot of news articles on my phone when traveling using Flipboard – a news site that lets me customize my news feed. Reading articles on my smartphone is the one part of my digital world that is still agonizingly slow. I often have to wait for 30 seconds or more for a news article to open – and it reminds me of the days when trying to open files back in the dial-up days.
The restrictions on these plans really highlight the hypocrisy of zero-rating. These carriers don’t want you to use their cellular data because they say it harms their network. And yet they are perfectly okay with letting customers view company-supplied content all day without restriction. This, more than anything, tells us that cellular data caps and other restrictions are all about making money and not about the network.
It’s still hard to think of any of these plans as a substitute for a landline connection. A cellular data plan like T-Mobile’s might make sense for somebody who is always on the go and not physically in one place very often. These plans are not cheap and I can certainly see households having to make a choice between a landline connection and a cellular plan. My gut tells me that any migration of landline customers to mobile-only data is probably a lot more about family economics than it is about being happy with one of these cellular data plan.