The wireless wars came back
The wireless wars came back last week, with a vengeance.
No. 1 wireless carrier Verizon kicked off a new rate war on Sunday, by announcing a return to unlimited wireless plans, something it had walked away from in 2012.
Since then, we've spent even more time surfing Facebook, penning tweets, watching YouTube videos and snapping and sharing photos on Snapchat, along with e-mail, texts and talking to Siri, Cortana and the Google assistant. This gobbles up lots and lots of data.
With rivals T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T competing against Verizon with easy to understand wireless plans, Verizon was forced to respond. And this is great news for consumers who just don’t understand how much data it costs to run our mobile lives. Is that 2 GB a month? 4 GB? 8 GB?
Now, a basic rate is $80 for unlimited data, but with a catch. If you go over 22 GB monthly of data, Verizon may slow you down.
In response, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint all offered deals to either match Verizon, undercut the company, in the case of T-Mobile, which starts at $70 monthly, or offer more services.
The good news is--unlimited data is back again, where it should be. The winner is the consumer, although we’re clearly paying more for wireless plans than we were ten years ago when the smartphone revolution started.
Back then, it was under $50 a month. Now, it's more than triple, depending upon the size of your family. I'm at $225 monthly for three of us. And despite the pricing change, sadly, I don't see the number shrinking over the next years.
Which is where our Eli Blumenthal comes in. ICYMI, check out his great piece on 6 ways to save on your cellphone bill.
In other major tech news this week, a seemingly minor Facebook announcement looks to bring in a huge and loud change for how we use the social network. Those videos that pop up in the News Feed have been silent, but now Facebook is turning them into soundies, and upping the volume.
As a video creator, this is great for me. It means more people will watch my videos. But as a consumer, I hate this. I look at Facebook at coffee shops, while standing online at the bank, while fast walking on the treadmill at the gym--and this means I’ll either have to be really annoying, wear headphones at all times, or go in and adjust my settings.
Finally, more terrible password breach news from Yahoo, which has been reeling in it for the last 2 years. This week some Yahoo account holders were told that a hacker could have accessed their account without the need of a password.
This is more drip drip from the September announcement of 500 million Yahoo accounts that had been stolen. Yahoo attributed the hack to a forged cookie.
Cookies are long string of letters and numbers that your computer stores to make it easy to log into a site when you return.