TECH 

Is My Carrier Cell Phone Throttling My Speed?

Unlimited data is the order of the day for most cell phone plans, but unlimited does not really mean unlimited. The major carriers and their low-cost brands all put restrictions on their unlimited deals-sometimes including hard caps on their LTE data speed.
Do speed caps matter? I think so. Running our Fastest Mobile Networks tests since 2010, I've found there's a significant difference in how responsive web pages and image-based social networks feel once you get around the 10Mbps level. On a phone, with current apps, it's hard to feel the difference when you get above 20Mbps, but the difference between 3Mbps and 10Mbps is the difference between your Instagram scrolling and stalling.
Relatively few plans will actually throttle your speed these days, unless you get to a very high level of usage. But most plans will throttle video streaming. On tiny phone screens, however, it's hard to say that most people can tell the difference between 480p and 1080p video.
Carriers also throttle tethering and hotspot mode. That's to prevent people from using their phone plans as their primary means of home internet access.
Postpaid Gets Priority
On all carriers, postpaid, first-party customers get priority on the network. The priority list tends to go: first postpaid customers, then prepaid customers on the primary brand, and then virtual carriers that buy minutes wholesale from the larger carriers.
The best way to think about deprioritization is that it becomes unreliable. Yeah, I know, speeds are unreliable anyway. But they become extra unreliable. This report from Tutela shows the effect of deprioritization on average speeds.
Carriers have recently gotten more liberal about hard speed caps, as they've gotten more comfortable with deprioritization. Verizon used to throttle all of its wholesale customers to 5Mbps, and AT & T used to throttle many to 8Mbps; that is not the case any longer, with only a few plans (some on the chart below) now doing throttling.

 

 

Along with the plans listed here-which are all owned and operated by the four major carriers-H2O Wireless speeds its speeds to 8Mbps, and US Mobile offers a range of speed-throttled, discount options.
For more on cheap wireless plans, check out our feature on The Best Cheap Cell Phone Plans You've Never Heard Of, which describes our favorite plans that are not owned by the major carriers. And cellular plans are a fast-changing world, so if you learn more, make sure to add it in the comments here.

 

 

Sascha Segan