Enjoy those days of watching entire movies on your cell phone for one low rate while you can, because your cell phone company is trying to snatch away your unlimited data plan from your smartphone addicted hands.
Cell phone companies are not really feeling unlimited data plans anymore now that we all have smartphones with the capacity to suck up tons of date. Their goal is to ease us out of unlimited plans and into shared data plans where we’re held more accountable for the data we consume. Lame.
Any smart, business-minded individual would naturally see this as an opportunity to undercut their competitors and swoop in to provide all the gigabytes we desire. That is exactly what Sprint is trying to do to AT&T and Verizon, in what BuzzFeedhas dubbed “the data wars.”
On Monday, Sprint introduced a new set of plans designed to undercut the market leaders, in its words, a plan that “offer[s] double the high-speed data at the same or lower price as compared to AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless.” But along with promising to offer twice as much usage, the plan comes with the same obvious caveat: “To improve the data experience for the majority of users, throughout speeds may be limited, varied or reduced on the network.”
That last little bit is known as throttling—when data companies intentionally slow down your internet service when they feel you’ve used too much data. Basically, Sprint is going to be better than AT&T and Verizon up to a certain point, then you’re back in the same boat.
It all seems a bit unnecessary when you consider the USB study that BuzzFeed points to which revealed that “about 1% of AT&T and Verizon customers actually leave their carriers every year and the customers who left most often just flip-flopped between the top two companies.”
So if you haven’t been pushed off of your unlimited data plan yet, cling to it. Cling tight. And for everyone else, since you’re probably going to stick with your current cell phone company anyway, it seems that you I will be forced to wonder if downloading that Real Housewives gif is worth the extra fifteen cents.
Image via Robert Kneschke/Shutterstock.
