Gadgetory

hahaha the next big thing in wireless plans is back it's unlimited I'm Brian Cooley from cnet in search of the next big thing and you number on limited plans were really big deal a few years ago then they kind of got pushed aside you didn't hear so much about them instead the big four carriers were talking a lot more about generally value plans things that were family buckets shared minutes or the prepaid carriers or just very low-cost plans but all of a sudden now unlimited is absolutely front of the burner now all for the big guys unlimited plans offer unlimited talk and unlimited text then there's a small asterisk alongside unlimited data after anywhere from 22 to 28 gigabytes of data in a given month depending on carrier each one will then start to slow your data speed for the remainder of that month now know those camps are pretty generous the average American right now uses around 2 gigabytes a month ericsson projects it by 2021 that will rise a lot but still be around nine gigabytes so these should be pretty generous for all but the person who wants to live on their mobile phone connection I'm not going to bore you with all the pricing and service details on these plans they have a whole bunch of footnotes that you can't imagine but two things I want you to be aware of if you plan to use your phone as a portable hotspot know that all the major carriers have a different cap on that before they start throttling 10 gigabytes per month and AT&T doesn't offer hotspot at all on their cheapo unlimited plan and all the big for now support HD video streaming not just SD as part of that data bucket but know that is the easiest way to approach the cap in a given month so what's brought unlimited back it wasn't just us asking for it no the industry has changed in developed markets like the US the wireless business is now largely a zero sum game there just are not a lot of new users coming on with their first smartphone so now growth among the big carriers is by stealing from each other and that means trying to improve their ARPU average revenue per user these plans run a wide gamut from fifty to a hundred bucks a month and roughly in ascending order of consumer brand and coverage perception but note these prices are all generally higher than the past plans that emphasized a little more value for the money another big trend pushing this is a move toward at least perceived simplification take a look at t-mobile's one plan for example or the way 80 is starting to try and simplify by bundling wireless with direct TV service choosing a wireless plan to my eye is still more complicated than it should be but these unlimited plans for both data talk and text start to at least normalize one entire set of factors so you can focus more on the other numbers the ones that have dollar signs in front of them now what's next at cnet com / next big thing I'm Brian