Major mobile carriers don’t really offer unlimited data plans anymore in the United States, and those who still have users on grandfathered plans try their very best time and again to get them off those plans. Yet the carriers often brand their new plans as unlimited when they truly aren’t, for example, Sprint today announced a new $20 unlimited data plan which throttles speed after just 1GB has been consumed.
The carrier clearly mentions that for $20 users only get 1GB of LTE data, that’s like watching a 20 minute video on YouTube in full HD, that’s really how long it will take to blow through that allocation which is supposed to last you for one month. However that’s not why this plan is being billed as “unlimited.”
Once the 1GB LTE data allocation has ended Sprint will automatically throttle the user down to 2G speeds where they’ll stay for the remainder of the billing cycle. You may have guessed where this is going, the plan offers unlimited data consumption on 2G speeds.
To be honest 2G speeds aren’t going to be of much use to anybody these days with data intensive apps and services, but the idea here is to control data overages once the allocation has run out. T-Mobile has a similar plan which provides 1GB LTE data with unlimited talk and text for $50 per month, only $10 more than Sprint which when you couple the $20 for unlimited talk and text comes out to $40 per month.
T-Mobile also bills its plan as unlimited, but there’s no unlimited 2G streaming. That’s really not what you expect these days when the word unlimited is used, most of us would very much like to forget the days when 2G speeds were all that you could get.
Edit: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that T-Mobile doesn’t call its plan unlimited, when in fact it does. The article has thus been updated.
Filed in . Read more about Sprint and T-Mobile. Source: newsroom.sprint