Sprint has announced the launch of a new unlimited plan that they’re calling “The Best Unlimited HD Plan Ever”, made for the specific purpose of one-upping T-Mobile and Verizon by offering a similar plan at a lower price. The new plan offers many of the same benefits as T-Mobile and Verizon’s new plans, with relatively few caveats, at a somewhat lower price that turns into roughly half off – if you go for a four-line family plan. The first line is $50 per month, as opposed to $70 for an individual line on T-Mobile’s newly revamped ONE plan, or $80 for a single Verizon line with unlimited data. That price per line goes down significantly on a family plan, with 2 lines costing $90 per month, and a third and fourth line being free after that. This brings the total per line for a family of four down to $22.50.
The features are mostly the same, with your basic unlimited data and 10 gigabytes of hotspot tethering per month, but Sprint’s plan does include a few caveats, of course, and the biggest one is that the price changes after a while. The introductory rate is far cheaper than that of other carriers, but at the end of March in 2018, the price for each line jumps up. The first line goes up to $60, while the second line is $40, then lines 3 and 4 are $30 each. This ends up working out to $130 per month for a four-line family plan, which is actually a tad higher than T-Mobile’s $120 for four lines, but still cheaper than Verizon’s $180 for four lines. Even so, one year of pricing roughly half that of other carriers is not a bad deal.
The second big caveat is that some aspects of the plan are throttled. This applies to varying degrees with other carriers as well, of course. Video streams are limited to 1080p resolution, with no limit on bandwidth. Music streaming is capped at 1.5 megabits per second, which should be fine for anything except streaming lossless files. Gaming streams, meanwhile, cap off at 8 megabits per second, which is mostly fine for any streaming from a cloud service or your home rig at a passable resolution and framerate.