Unlimited data plans are a mess: here’s how to pick the best one
Tips, tricks, and hacks for the tech in your life.
Above Unlimited. Unlimited &More. Unlimited &More Premium. These are the names of new mobile data plans introduced in just the last month by Verizon and AT&T. In an era without net neutrality, we’ve drifted far, far away from the days when “unlimited data” was a simple concept that meant you could use your smartphone to its full capabilities without any handcuffs or confusing limitations.
Carriers will tell you that the fundamental, underlying promise of unlimited data remains true in 2018: you can use your smartphone as much as you want without overage charges or being cut off once you’ve surpassed a specific threshold. And yes, that’s true. Consumers are generally in a better place now than they were a few years ago, back when Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint were offering tiered buckets of data and charging $10 or $15 for every extra gigabyte above your chosen allotment. None of us miss those days.
We thought unlimited data was dead then. But some prodding from T-Mobile helped turn the industry around and left data buckets behind as an ugly memory. Even so, unlimited data today is much different than in the early days of the iPhone and Android smartphones. Now more than ever, carriers are aggressively policing their networks and implementing restrictions on video quality and hotspot usage. They continue to arbitrarily differentiate between the different types of data you’re accessing with your smartphone — whether it’s through an app or simply the mobile web.
theverge.com |
