Just one month ago, US Mobile updated its unlimited wireless plans. As a whole, the changes resulted in significantly higher pricing for subscribers. One unlimited plan got a price increase of $15/month. Some new talk and text plan options were also introduced with pricing largely considered to be unfavorable compared to what was previously available.
Fast forward one month and US Mobile has opted to revert some prices back to their previous model. The MVNO also decided to keep one new plan option in place, which should actually be beneficial to some consumers.
US Mobile's Updated Unlimited Plan Options
A summary of US Mobile's updated unlimited phone plan options are shown below. Note: US Mobile considers unlimited data to be 15GB at high speeds before throttling to 2G data speeds.
| Talk & Text | Unlimited $10 | |||
| Data | 1GB $10 | 5GB $15 | 10GB $25 | Unlimited $35 |
| Data Speed | 1Mbps $0 | 5Mbps $5 | Unrestricted $15 |
In short, pricing for unlimited talk and text got reduced back to $10/month. In the August update, pricing for unlimited talk and text was increased to $20/month. A 1GB data plan option was kept in place from the August update. The unlimited data plan option remains priced $5 higher than it was before US Mobile's August plan updates. You can see what US Mobile's plans looked like after the August update in the table below. Note: all talk allotments also came with unlimited text messaging.
| Talk | 200 min. $8 | 1,000 min. $10 | Unlimited $20 | |
| Data | 1GB $10 | 5GB $15 | 10GB $25 | Unlimited $35 |
| Data Speed | 1Mbps $0 | 5Mbps $5 | Unrestricted $15 |
Editor's Take
During the past 3 years, US Mobile recorded massive revenue growth. However, the August plan updates likely jeopardized the company's ability to continue to grow revenue at a rapid pace into the future. By reverting pricing back to the previous model, I think US Mobile has righted a wrong. The pricing update in August was just too much for customers to swallow and made US Mobile's phone plans a whole lot less competitive compared to the rest of the MVNO marketplace.
US Mobile operates as an MVNO on the Verizon and T-Mobile networks. When it comes to data options, the company takes a different approach compared to the rest of the marketplace. Not only do customers get to choose the allotment of data they'd like to have, but they also get to choose how fast they want their data speeds to be. The updated phone plans are still not best in class in terms of pricing, but they are at least back to being much more competitive in the marketplace.
It’s not $10/mo, though, is it? They’ve got a $2/mo fee on top of it, plus taxes, plus a couple dollars if you want any data (required for MMS messages). Pix at a flat $15/mo is actually much cheaper.
They seem to be following the Spirit Airlines business plan of nickel and dining..