Of the big carriers in the United States you often don’t hear about U.S. Cellular, but U.S. Cellular is looking to change that with some serious competitive pricing. U.S. Cellular’s plans have an interesting twist to them in that they contain a base price for the plan itself and each device added carries a cost with it as well. It’s sort of like an add-a-line charge but a little bit different since the lines on your account all share data. U.S. Cellular’s new plan is being advertised as $140 a month for a family of four, all with unlimited talk, text and 10GB of data per month to share. 10GB is a pretty decent amount for the price, especially considering how little some might use versus others on the plan. U.S. Cellular points out that this pricing is $20 less per month than AT&T and Verizon who are the two largest wireless carriers in the US. U.S. Cellular also points out that a small business with five employees can get the 10GB shared data plan for $150 per month, which is $25 less than AT&T and Verizon.
At the 10GB data level per month or higher it’s only $10 to add an additional phone to the plan, giving you unlimited talk, text and that shared pool of data for every device added. U.S. Cellular also holds a device installment plan option, so you can walk out of a U.S. Cellular store with a brand new phone and no money down and just pay for it in installments every month. They’ll also pay your early termination fees up to $350 much like T-Mobile had started a few months ago. T-Mobile also has a very similar plan but tends to have different coverage areas, and isn’t mentioned in the press release at all. U.S. Cellular’s coverage area touts 90% LTE coverage for those with service, and the plan is to bring that up to 93% by the end of 2014. That’s a pretty impressive statistic and one that might have you jumping for joy if you’re in an area with tough coverage on another carrier. Competition is a great thing, especially in the historically fairly stagnant wireless industry, as we’ve seen some incredible change and growth because of it over the last year or so.