Recently, T-Mobile made waves in the industry, the way they normally do, by announcing a one-size-fits-all unlimited plan.
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Sprint’s new plan, Unlimited Freedom, becomes available today.
“In fact, most individuals we showed could not see any difference between optimized and premium-resolution streaming videos when viewing on mobile phone screens”. They’ll still have more reasonable prepaid deals, but for post-paid service, it sounds like T-Mobile One is going to be the one choice.
For some existing customers, T-Mobile One would mean a price increase. Verizon is the only one to charge for the feature, with a $5 fee to enable ‘Safety Mode’. In addition, the company will eliminate overage charges and instead, it’s reducing data usage to a 128 kbps speed when the customer exceeds its limit; this would apply to the rest of the billing cycle. The first line on the plan is $70 per month, the second is $50, and additional lines, up to eight, are $20 per month. On T-Mobile, a family of 4 costs $160 for the base price. You can add tablets for $20 per month each.
Thus, there’s no HD video upsell as there is on T-Mobile.
To add it all up, under the new plans, four lines on AT&T’s 25 GB plan would be $190 per month.
As for the throttling, Sprint says you’ll get 500Kbps for music, 2Mbps for gaming, and 480p video (doesn’t specify a bitrate there).
The era of telecommunication carriers charging you once you top the data limit is finally coming to a close.
AT&T’s Mobile Share Value plans, which won’t be available to new customers come August 21st, range from 300MB (US$20 a month) data up to 50GB ($375 a month). Lines after that would be another $30 each. A family of three with 3 GB of data had to pay only $90 before; with ONE the bill would hit $140.
T-Mobile fired back with T-Mobile ONE unlimited plans that seem great on the surface, but charge you extra for HD video streaming and full 4G LTE tethering speeds. However, it throttles certain types of data like T-Mobile.
Sprint didn’t want to be left out of when everyone else is shuffling their wireless plans, so it has launched Unlimited Freedom. 15GB and higher plans include unlimited talk and text messages in Mexico and Canada.
Unlimited Freedom will cost an additional $40 per month for a second line, additional lines will be priced in increments of $30 per month for up to 10 lines. The plan comes with the same restrictions on video streaming, but there are also bitrate restrictions on music streaming (although those won’t be as noticeable as with video) and gaming (2 Mbps). The new plans – dubbed T-Mobile One – will launch September 6. There’s also no mention of worldwide roaming or other perks.
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Sprint’s news about Unlimited Freedom came out just just hours after T-Mobile’s announcement yesterday.
