Why Did Verizon Kill The Unlimited Plan That Everyone Loved?

For the last six months, Verizon was doing well. It introduced an excellent Unlimited data plan with minimal restrictions and an affordable price, and subscribers fell over themselves to sign up.

Well, that’s all out the window. This morning, Verizon made some significant changes to its Unlimited plan that makes it more expensive and worse, and it’s started throttling all smartphone video — on any plan, regardless of price — to 720p.

We’ll come back to the plans and Verizon’s need for a new dictionary in a moment, but first, let’s talk about why Verizon had to make these changes in the first place. Simply put, I don’t think Verizon’s network can keep up.

According to data put out by two testing companies — OpenSignal and Ookla (the company behind Speedtest.net) — Verizon’s average network speed has slowed since the introduction of unlimited data plans. The drop in speed is a few percentage points overall, but the problem is probably more related to congestion at popular spots during peak times. If everyone is streaming video over the network while waiting at the airport, for example, that’s going to put the crunch on the network.

Now, that’s just speculation, because it’s surprisingly difficult to get good data on mobile networks, thanks to the massive size, complexity, and difficulty of testing. Add to that the fact that networks actually pay testing companies for the “awards” that they hand out every few months, and you understand why it’s difficult to take anything at face value.

OpenSignal and Ookla are both paid by T-Mobile (for the rights to publish data, not for the testing itself), and both use crowdsourced testing that relies on speedtests run through apps on users’ smartphones. That makes it difficult to scientifically control the data, but it does have the advantage of a huge sample size and more real-time results.

Verizon, on the other hand, prefers to point to RootMetrics, a company that conducts drive testing to evaluate network performance. Verizon’s director of corporate communications, Kelly Crummey, said that “Eight times in a row RootMetrics has declared Verizon the “undisputed leader” for overall network coverage and reliability. That’s eight straight times Verizon has been named #1. And speed? We’ve won that the past seven times in a row.”