It’s unfortunate, but you don’t see many phone plans nowadays that include truly unlimited data. That’s a void that AT&T’s official prepaid brand, Cricket Wireless, wants to fill by announcing an unlimited data plan of its own.
For $70 a month, which goes down to $65 a month if you opt into Cricket’s auto-pay system, customers can get unlimited talk, text, and data for either their Cricket smartphones or for handsets they bring themselves. Cricket made sure to criticize T-Mobile in the process, noting that T-Mobile also offers an unlimited data plan, but for $30 more than the former’s offering. To rub a bit of salt in the wound, Cricket will offer a $100 credit for T-Mobile customers who make the switch.
Unlike other “unlimited” data plans and Cricket’s own data plans, which throttle your data speeds after you exhaust your monthly 4G LTE data allowance, the newly announced unlimited data plan will not throttle customers. However, do note that you will be capped at 8Mbps for 4G LTE and 4Mbps for HSPA+. In other words, Cricket’s plan is unlimited in the amount of data you can use, not the speeds at which you can do so.
If you stick primarily to Wi-Fi on a daily basis, then the speed cap is unlikely to be a deterrent. However, if you’re one who depends primarily on cellular data, then Cricket’s new plan might not be for you.
Cricket’s new unlimited data plan will be available starting tomorrow, April 17. If you can’t afford the $70 per month fee for the plan, however, Cricket will still offer its Basic, Smart, and Pro data plans, which go for $35, $45, and $55 a month, respectively, with auto-pay. Basic includes 2.5GB of 4G LTE data, while Smart includes 5GB and Pro includes 10GB. Regardless of which plan you choose, they all include unlimited talk and text.
