Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile all adjusted various elements in their rate plans and service offerings this week, likely in an attempt to straighten up their competitive positioning ahead of the holiday shopping season.
Here are the changes operators made:
Verizon
Verizon refreshed the pricing on its prepaid service, with the most notable change being a reduction in the cost of its unlimited plan from $75 per month to $65 per month with autopay. Verizon detailed its changes on its website.
And Droid Life summarized the changes by noting that Verizon reduced the number of its prepaid pricing options from five to four, and also generally raised prices by $5 per month while concurrently offering a $5 discount to those customers who select the autopay option.
Sprint
Sprint said it will launch a “multifaceted advertising and marketing campaign” that will focus on the improvements the company has made to its LTE network. As part of that effort, the company said it will increase the data cap on its mobile hotspot service.
Specifically, Sprint said its Unlimited Plus and Unlimited Freedom customers will now get 50 GB each month of mobile hotspot data, and its Unlimited Premium customers will get 100 GB of monthly mobile hotspot data. As USA Today noted, that’s a significant increase from the 15 GB hotspot data cap on the Unlimited Plus and Unlimited Freedom plans, and the 50 GB cap on the Unlimited Premium.
Sprint’s action follows a similar move by the company’s prepaid Boost brand. As noted by Wave7 Research, Boost earlier this week added 50% more hotspot data to its $50 and $60 monthly plans.
And, as PhoneScoop noted, for a limited time customers who switch to Sprint’s Unlimited Basic plan can get three lines for $24 per month, with the fourth and fifth lines free. After January 2020, those rates will rise to $60 per month for the first line, $40 per month for the second line, and $20 per month for lines three through five.
T-Mobile
Finally, T-Mobile launched a new unlimited LTE data plan for its prepaid brand, as noted by Prepaid Phone News. The new unlimited prepaid plan costs $50 per month but will only be available for a limited time.
Importantly, the publication noted that customer speeds on the plan may be slowed after they consume more than 50 GB of data in a month.