In a trend started by T-Mobile a year ago, just about every cellular carrier in the United States offers a so-called unlimited plan, which throttles your speeds after you hit a certain amount of usage. Verizon introduced its own version of this in February, but its plans have just gotten worse.
With the Go Unlimited plan, Verizon says that you can be throttled if the network is congested, which means that this can happen at any time, rather than after a predetermined amount of data is used. Users will also be limited to streaming video at 480p, and mobile hotspot usage is throttled down to 600kbps.
And then there"s the Beyond Unlimited plan, the name of which should give you a hint that none of this is really unlimited at all and it"s just marketing jargon. For a bit more money every month, you"ll still get throttled when the network is congested, but only after you"ve used up 22GB of data, and you can stream at 720p on your phone, or 1080p on a tablet.
With Beyond Unlimited, you also get unlimited hotspot, the first 15GB of which will be at 4G LTE speeds. This isn"t all that different than if Verizon said that the plan is completely free, as long as you pay $85 first.
And then there"s Business Unlimited, which offers 25GB of high-speed data before throttling, although you"re still stuck with 480p streaming. Finally, Prepaid Unlimited seems to be the same as Go Unlimited, but a bit more expensive.