Sprint, T-Mobile offer revamped data plans ahead of next-gen iPhone launch

Say what you want about the open market, at least it spurs competition.

Following Wednesday’s announcement as to changes to its mobile plans, wireless carriers T-Mobile and Sprint have announced new “unlimited” plans of their own.

T-Mobile has replaced all its plans with a single one called T-Mobile One.

The Mobile One plan apparent offers the following:

It’s 100% unlimited and comes with unlimited talk and text and unlimited 4G LTE smartphone data – including unlimited standard definition video – all on America’s fastest 4G LTE network. And, it’s available at a great price: just $40 per line for a family of four.

The fine print has the $40 per line rate as being applicable only if you’re buying four lines for $160 a month. Otherwise, the standard line goes for $70 a month.

It’s also been noted that video on the plan is capped at standard-definition quality – if you want to watch HD video, that will cost you an extra $25/month, so that headline rate of $40 more than doubles in price to $95/month.

Finally, the company’s Binge On deal already gave unlimited SD video for many popular services, so the switch to all-you-can-eat data may not make much real-life difference.

Sprint’s offer retails for $60 a month, but also puts limits as to video, music and gaming via unspecified “optimized” rates. A two-line deal is available for $100/mo, reducing the per-line cost to $50/mo, while each extra line costs $30/mo. There’s no add-on option available for faster video. As with T-Mobile and AT&T, both talk-time and texts are unlimited.

AT&T’s new plans claim there are “no overages” for heavy data use, but cite that a user’s data speed will be reduced to 2G once the data limit is hit.

Via 9to5Mac and Recode