Re: New Plans
This plan is a win for everyone except perhaps for the people who have unlimited data and *use* a lot of it. Everyone else gets a better data allowance, and something else major that this thread seems to be missing: unlimited international texting. This is big - with the world growing smaller, more and more of us have friends, colleagues and contacts abroad.
Personally, I'm on the $30, 5GB data + 100 minutes + unlimited nationwide texting plan. This suffices for me, but honestly speaking the new $50 plan looks awfully tempting to me. Yes, it'd be a drop from 5 gigs to 1 gig of data, but I wouldn't have to worry about running out of minutes, and I can pretty well swing it on 1 gig (but I couldn't on 500 MB) despite being a fairly heavy data user, since I have ample wifi access. Right now, I sometimes watch videos at the gym but I don't bother to download them ahead of time (such as making certain videos available offline on YouTube, for example). But I certainly could. I also sometimes download a ton of podcasts using mobile data just because I fee like I have to get close to the 5 gigs I'm paying for. But I could just stick to downloading those on wifi.
The international texting would be worth it for me as I have family in India and a few friends in Europe I really would like to reconnect with. And I wonder if in six months' time, we are going to get an announcement that Simple Choice plans will also start including Stateside Talk, instead of just text.
Unlimited mobile data on the cheap was always going to go away. With usage at the high end going up severely and a small percentage finding ways to use even more data by evading tethering limits, people who are better at data management at some point needed to stop subsidizing the higher end users.