Verizon’s new plan has serious trade-offs
‘Unlimited’ data puts cap on streaming video, restricts bandwidth
Wednesday’s shift by Verizon, the nation’s largest wireless carrier, to offer a choice of plans with “unlimited” data (both contain enough restrictions to make “unmetered” a more accurate description) adds some math and fine-print perusal to your service shopping.
In place of the $80 offering Verizon introduced in February, the carrier now leads off its unmetered data choices with a $75 “Go Unlimited” deal ($130 for two lines, $150 for three and $160 for four) that demands significant compromises. Think of this as the equivalent of “Basic Economy” airfares that unbundle many traditional features of air travel.
“Go Unlimited” caps the resolution of streaming video at 480p, the same quality as a DVD. On a tablet, you get 720p, the minimum resolution for high-definition TV. That’s well below the capabilities of screens on either type of device.
Bandwidth you share with nearby devices via Wi-Fi — called mobile hotspot use or tethering — is cut all the way back to 600 kbps, even worse than the typically wretched WiFi at tech trade shows such as CES.
You will see your speed “deprioritized” if your phone connects to a tower experiencing congestion, even if you haven’t used up any data yourself in the current billing cycle.
A new $85 per month “Beyond Unlimited” plan — $160 for two lines, $180 for three lines and $200 for four — ups the streaming-video resolution limit to 720p on phones and 1080p, or “full HD,” on tablets and offers 15 gigabytes of fullspeed hot spot use a month.
It also doesn’t risk deprioritization until you’ve used up 22 GB of data in the current billing cycle, and it throws in free roaming in Canada and Mexico.
Note that on both unlimited plans, you need to enable automatic payments from a bank account or debit card — sorry, cash-back credit-card users — or the price goes up by $5 a line.
Many users may not mind the lowered video quality enough to pay $10 extra.
“I think the reality is that most users won’t notice being served up 480p instead of 780p,” analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research said in an email. He pointed to T-Mobile’s earlier imposition of the same 480p limit. “The reaction to TMobile’s BingeOn suggests that lots of people are fine with lower quality but adequate video on a small screen if it saves bandwidth.”
Hot spot use is different. NPD Group analyst Brad Akyuz wrote that the research firm’s opt-in monitoring of smartphone users found that 20% used that feature — and of those, 41% employed it weekly and 16% daily.
If you need multiple lines of data, Verizon’s 5G plan is no good. And if average data use keeps going up, even 5 GB may not seem like much a year from now.