Understanding The Limits Of Unlimited Plans

Touched off by Verizon Wireless’ introduction of Unlimited Plans back in mid-February of this year, all of the major wireless providers are now offering Unlimited Calling Plans to new and existing customers.

Unlimited plans are not new to the industry, both Cricket and Metro PCS have long offered these types of plans as one of their key differentiators. The original “AT&T Wireless” briefly offered an unlimited plan for $99.99 (called the Charter Plan) back in third quarter of 2002 to promote their new GSM/GPRS network. However, this is the first time that all of the wireless providers are in on this new “category” of plan. Yes I say “category” because I suspect that unlimited plans may actually be here to stay – at least for some.

For $99.99, Sprint tops the competition with the “Simply Everything” plan, which includes almost everything – Unlimited: Voice, Data (email & web), Messaging, and Push-to-Talk. T-Mobile is the next best value with Unlimited Voice and Text Messaging for $99.99.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless are comparably the same, including unlimited voice calling at the $99.99 price point, both boasting the nation’s best coverage. Frankly, if you use your cell phone primarily for voice calling, and want the broadest national coverage, one of these plans is the way to go. Add $20 for unlimited messaging (txt, video, etc) for AT&T, and virtually unlimited messaging (unlimited “In” messaging plus 5000 messages) for Verizon Wireless, and you have a comparable package to T-Mobile.

If you have a full featured phone, but not a PDA, add $35 for AT&T and Verizon Wireless and you have a near comparable package to Sprint’s “Simply Everything”, less the push-to-talk (which is available on a limited set of Sprint/Nextel phones and is most valuable if you want to link-in with the Nextel install base).

Get Verizon Wireless’s Premium Unlimited plan for $139.99 and (in addition to the unlimited voice, messaging and data/web) you will also get unlimited VZ Navigator (turn by turn directions, location based yellowpage-like search, etc), available on virtually all Verizon Wireless phones. In my opinion, navigation rivals messaging as the most valuable secondary application on a cell phone. You can add AT&T’s and Sprint’s navigation application to their plans for about $10 more. T-Mobile does not offer navigation.

If you have a PDA or Blackberry, add $50 to the AT&T and Verizon Wireless plan to match Sprint’s unlimited “Simply Everything” plan (with the same caveat for push-to-talk). For T-Mobile, add Blackberry/Email/Web for between $9.99 and $29.99, depending your email and data needs).

The limitation on unlimited plans is that they are limited to ONE user. You cannot hang family/shared lines off these plans. If you want more unlimited lines, multiply the price by the number of lines. The exception is that Sprint knocks $5 off the price of each incremental unlimited line that you add to your account. I would add that for Sprint, you can remove some of the add-on features and keep the minutes unlimited, or keep the features and limit the the minutes (e.g 450, 900, etc), and you can have a truly great value that meets your needs, at even lower monthly rates.

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