When it comes to getting your first smartphone, you might be looking at pricing and whether or not the smartphone will work in your area. Since the largest mobile carriers coverage does not reach into the depths of rural areas, some of them have branched off into smaller, pre-paid networks that can help those that do not live in the big cities. The tradeoff is the you are going to be paying mostly full retail price for the phone and it is going to likely be more mid-range than high end, but it will be a good option as a first smartphone.
Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile are two carriers that offer very affordable phones and data plans, but there is one catch with their “unlimited” data that is about to become an even bigger catch. The deal behind the unlimited data on these networks is that after you burn through 2.5GB of data per month, the network takes your 3G speeds and throttles them down to 256kbps. That might not bother too many that are typically connected to Wi-Fi networks, but for the rest the news is about to get worse.
According to reports, the two mobile carriers are planning to bring that throttled speed down to just 128kbps sometime this year. That will be cutting the data speeds down to the point that you will be hoping there is a Wi-Fi network somewhere very close. Once the monthly cycle has ended, usually when the day you pay your bill, the 2.5GB of data will be reset for you at 3G or 4G speeds. This is not good news at all, but Sprint explained things like this, “the enormous data usage driven by the increasingly sophisticated smartphones we make available, and the more extensive uses customers are finding for these devices.”
You can easily bump your account and reset the data speeds by paying sooner than your billing date, but that is just going to cost you more money and you will not be getting much in return unless you really have no Wi-Fi networks in your area. With the spread of Wi-Fi networks all over the country, it would hard for some users to go through the 2.5GB of data their network provides. Verizon Wireless claims that 80 percent of its users go through less than 2GB of data per month.
