Unlimited, Until the Twenty-Eighth

Unlimited is the strongest word in phone advertising, and it is the only word on the poster that a customer cannot check. A data plan that is sold as unlimited sounds like a plan with no end in it. In practice it is a plan whose limits have been moved somewhere you are not going to read.

There are usually three of them. The first is a speed cap. Some of the cheapest unlimited plans run at a speed that is fixed low from the first day, several times slower than the same network gives everybody else: fine for maps and messages, useless for anything larger. The second is the fair-use point, a number of gigabytes written into the terms, after which the provider either slows you down or serves you last when the network is busy. You still have data. You have data that behaves like a queue. The third is tethering: unlimited on the phone itself, and a much smaller allowance when you share the connection with a laptop.

None of this is a secret, and none of it is a scandal. It is written down. It is written down in the part of the contract that is built to be scrolled past, in a document nobody reads standing at a counter with people waiting behind them, and the number that matters most is usually the last one on the page.

Which means the question people ask is the wrong question. If you ask how much data you get, the honest answer and the useless answer are the same word. Ask what happens at the end instead: what speed you are left with after the fair-use point, whether that speed lasts until the month ends, and whether the month starts on the first or on the day you signed up.

Unlimited describes what you are sold. Speed describes what you are given. Ask what your phone will do on the twenty-eighth, and if the person selling it has to go and find out, you have already learned something useful about the plan.