In April, MetroPCS introduced soft caps and throttling. It kept unlimited data an option, but it raised the price of that plan by $10 to $70 a month. Apparently it’s had a change of heart because the new rates show a $60 all-you-can eat voice, text and data tier. But the regional prepaid carrier has also removed some of the perks that used to come with unlimited — no more Rhapsody Music subscription and no more video-and music-on demand downloads from its MetroStudio app. You can still get those services, you just have to subscribe to them separately for a $5 to $10 a month fee.

So if you liked all of Metro’s add on services you might wind up paying more, but I suspect most customers probably want to select their own multimedia options, and the $60 plan will wind up being a much better deal. If you’re already a Spotify subscriber, why pay $10 a month for a Rhapsody service your never use? (Rhapsody is probably too distracted by its massive European launch to notice.)

Metro is also offering two lower tiers, both with unlimited text and talk: a $50 2.5 GB plan and a $40 500 MB plan. After those caps are exceeded, Metro will throttle your speeds, but MetroPCS has a very gentle definition of throttling. According to the company it will slow you down to CDMA 3G speeds, which may be sub-megabit, but are much faster than the slow crawl most other carriers subject you to.

After several years of stellar growth, Metro has come on some hard times. Earlier this week it reported it a Q4 loss of 93,000 customers in a quarter carriers usually flourish. That brought its total subscriber losses for 2012 to 460,000. T-Mobile, however, is coming to the carrier’s rescue. It’s acquisition of the MetroPCS is expected to close in the second quarter.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• A look back at mobile in the third quarter
• Mobile 2012 and beyond

Legere, 54, will officially change offices on Sept. 22, when interim CEO Jim Alling will return to his old job as T-Mobile’s COO. From his resume, Alling Legere seems like an odd choice. Global Crossing, which was acquired by Level 3 Communications last year, was a submarine cable operator providing the fiber connections that link continents, not a consumer-facing wireless business. Legere had a stint at Dell Computer, but the last time he worked at a retail carrier was in 1998 at AT&T, and even there he wasn’t working in the cellular or consumer side of the house. He managed AT&T’s Asian wireline business operations and headed up corporate strategy.

But then again, someone unaccustomed to how things are usually done in the US mobile industry is exactly what T-Mobile needs right now. If T-Mobile is to succeed it will be through challenging the status quo established by AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which collectively manage two-thirds of all US mobile connections. T-Mobile started down that path after its planned merger with AT&T failed last year. As I wrote when Humm departed in June, T-Mobile’s new CEO shouldn’t change a thing about strategy. It’s not clear whether Legere is going to listen to GigaOM, but hopefully he’ll listen to the T-Mobile’s more-than-capable staff, who started laying the foundation of that challenger strategy long before DT got into bed with Ma Bell.

T-Mobile is questioning the long-accepted accepted pricing models in the US mobile market. It’s moving customers away from device subsidies and in the process eliminating the hidden device “mortgage” payments we make on our monthly bills. It’s offering data plans at a steep discount to AT&T and Verizon, and it recently rejoined Sprint in selling an unlimited smartphone plan.

On the network side, T-Mobile is taking advantage of the limited spectrum resources it has to overhaul its network, shutting down old 2G networks so it can repurpose their airwaves for an LTE network as well as eke out more 3G capacity. In the process, it’s realigning its networks bands with the major North American GSM operators, which will give it access to a greater variety of devices – including the new iPhone. (T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray will detail that transformation at GigaOM’s Mobilize Conference this Friday.)

That network overhaul, however, can’t come soon enough. As the only nationwide US operator sans iPhone, T-Mobile is suffering customer defections it can’t stem no matter how cheap it makes its data plans. T-Mobile is actually 400,000 subscribers smaller today than it was at this time last year.

Legere is going to have to figure out how to staunch that subscriber bleed, but hopefully he won’t do it by reversing T-Mobile’s course and emulating the big operators. Though T-Mobile once had dreams of mega-carrier glory, the failure of AT&T-Mo put an end to those fantasies. Whether it likes it or not, T-Mobile’s new role is that of the market challenger, and it’s not going to succeed by playing the same game as its bigger rivals.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Before you get too excited there is one big caveat: you are not allowed to tether your smartphone or use it as a mobile hotspot. T-Mobile’s not crazy. It doesn’t want to open up its network to the full brunt of the PC-and tablet-driven internet. But whatever you can do on your smartphone — short of sharing your connection — is fair game: Netflix, YouTube, massive file sharing, you name it. According to T-Mobile, it won’t throttle or cap.

Director of Marketing Harry Thomas said T-Mobile is revisiting the unlimited plan simply because that’s what its customers want. The issue wasn’t megabyte stinginess –- T-Mobile already offers the biggest buckets of smartphone data for the cheapest prices in the U.S. with the exception of Sprint. Instead, T-Mobile is targeting the customer that frets over his monthly data consumption -– the one that worries about whether he can still download a video or stream music without breaching his data cap, Thomas said.

“We’re going where our customers are leading us, and unlimited is where they’re telling us to go,” Thomas said.

The unlimited plans will come in two flavors depending on whether you paid for your phone up front or took advantage of one of T-Mo’s subsidized devices. Value plan — or unsubsidized –- customers pay $20 a month, while classic –- subsidized –- customers pay $30. The value plan is pretty much the cheapest data plan in wireless data among the nationwide operators. Sprint’s unlimited plans cost $30 and are still restricted primarily to its 3G CDMA network, while T-Mobile offers much faster HSPA+ speeds in 229 markets. At AT&T, $20 will get you a measly 300 MB, while Verizon Wireless has stopped selling individual data plans entirely.

T-Mobile is keeping its metered plans in place for customers that do want to use their phone’s hotspot capabilities. Ironically, that means you would pay more for a 5-GB plan ($25 for value, $35 for classic) than you would for an unlimited one.

A lot of people in this industry have opined — myself among them — that the unlimited data plan is endangered species, an untenable business model in a world where mobile capacity is so constrained. But Thomas said T-Mobile believes that unlimited is still a viable strategy. It’s not a limited promotion or some loss-leading pricing gimmick to stem its customer losses, he said: T-Mobile expects to make money off these plans.

That’s a bold statement coming from T-Mobile considering just how much data its customers consume. The carrier recently revealed that its average smartphone customer eats up 760 MB a month, far higher than the industry average. On its 42-Mbps dual-carrier HSPA+ network that number increases to a whopping 1.3 GB a month.

If Thomas is right about unlimited being a viable business for T-Mobile, then that raises a very interesting question: If unlimited can work for T-Mobile, why can’t it work it for AT&T and Verizon?

T-Mobile image courtesy of Flickr user swruler9284; Buffet image courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE

Virtual operators are sprouting up like weeds in a garden – except these weeds are starting to look a lot more attractive than the rose beds they’re enveloping. These mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) essentially resell the voice and data services of big operators, but often at much lower prices and with more flexible plans.

In just the last few weeks we’ve seen several new ones pop up. Last Friday, GSM Nation gave us a sneak peak at the MVNO it plans to birth this fall, distinguishing itself from the pack with a retail portal that sells almost any smartphone. Data-only operator Karma emerged last week, touting a unique social model for sharing bandwidth with the masses. Last month, Voyager Mobile launched offering two simple but comprehensive plans – one with data and one without.

MVNOs all but died out in the last decade, victim to their own over-segmentation of the market. The only survivors were the ones who kept their focus on the budget prepaid segment like TracFone and operator-owned sub-brands like Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile. So why the sudden of flurry of activity in the last year?

We posed that question to a couple of MVNOs and their answer was a bit surprising: MVNOs are thriving because the big network operators are letting them thrive.

Here come the GSM boys

A good deal of new MVNOs have built their business models around cheap and plentiful data, and there’s a reason: operators have become much more flexible on how they charge for mobile broadband. For the longest time, carriers simply wouldn’t give MVNOs access to their data networks. When they started to so, they charged prohibitive rates and made their virtual partners pay for their megabytes up front, making it very hard for MVNOs to craft reasonable data plans, GSM Nation CEO Ahmed Khattak said.

But nine months ago, AT&T and T-Mobile started selling data and voice airtime by the bucket, which gives MVNOs much more flexibility in pricing, Khattak said. Even more significantly, those carriers started working directly with MVNOs to craft unique plans in exchange for a percentage of the plans’ revenues. The MVNO submits a proposed bundle of minutes and data to an carrier – along with a $15,000 fee — and if it’s approved, the carrier then takes 25 percent to 30 percent off the top of every monthly bill, Khattak said.

With those new policies in place, it makes it very easy and very cheap to launch an MVNO, Khattak said. GSM Nation will get off the ground with only $700,000 in investment, supplemented by revenues from its smartphone retail business, Khattak said.

“The big decision we had to make was ‘do we go with AT&T or do we go with T-Mobile,’” Khattak said. “We chose T-Mobile because T-Mobile is much more receptive to new MVNOs than AT&T. They give us more bandwidth, while AT&T is very protective of its network.”

Another key factor was that AT&T doesn’t allow MVNOs to sell any handsets Ma Bell currently it offers, which would have prevented GSM Nation from connecting the Apple iPhones and Galaxy devices it retails in its online store. Since GSM Nation is first and foremost an unlocked phone purveyor, that policy was deal-killer for Khattak. But it certainly hasn’t stopped other MVNOs from signing up with AT&T. TracFone’s Straight Talk, H2O Wireless and Red Pocket offer SIM-only plans that allow it bypass that restriction as long as their customers bring their own devices to the network.

Sprint: An MVNO’s best friend

Sprint has a long history of supporting MVNOs, but recently it has opened its network even further to wholesale partners, said Elliot Noss, president and CEO of Tucows, a webhosting company that launched its own MVNO, Ting, in February. Sprint’s wholesale rates and flexible policies allow Ting to offer some of the most innovative – and potentially disruptive plans – in the industry.

Ting sells the closest thing the U.S. has to metered data plan. Customers sign up for tiers or minutes, SMS and data, but if you use less than your plan’s allotment in a given month, Ting will credit you for the unused minutes, texts or data on your next. If you use more Ting will charge you for the additional usage at no penalty. According to Noss, Ting’s savviest customers merely select zero in all three categories and just pay for what they consume each month.

Sprint’s embrace of the virtual operator model has landed it a lot of partners. Republic Wireless, Voyager, Movida, Kajeet and a dozen others all use Sprint’s network. Sprint’s friendliness toward MVNOs carries over to its 4G partner Clearwire – in which Sprint owns a plurality stake. Data-only MVNOs like Karma, NetZero and FreedomPop, as well as Ting, have all signed on with the WiMAX carrier.

“Sprint has more of a history of wholesale,” Noss said in an email interview. “They are also a very large, but very hungry #3 in the market. That is really a perfect combination to make for a great wholesale partner. Having a wholesale and retail division inside the same company is a challenge that we appreciate at Tucows and we chose very carefully.”

Sprint does place some restrictions on handsets Ting is allowed to sell, and as a CDMA carrier it can’t resort to SIM card plans to bypass those policies. But Sprint only bans some devices, and the exclusivity period is relatively short, Noss said. “Basically, if they’re putting a big advertising push behind a device, they’re going to want time to reap the benefits of that push themselves,” Noss said. Sprint is also much less protective of its network than others. For instance, Sprint has agreed to make to make its LTE network, launching this summer, immediately available to Ting.

Are the carriers coming to MVNOs or are they being dragged?

Khattak believes that the big carriers have thrown in the towel, and have adopted a if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em attitude toward the market. Operators know they’re going to continue to lose customers to these new competitive virtual operators, so they might as well reap the wholesale revenues rather than give that business to another operator, Khattak said.

Noss doesn’t see it that way. With the exceptions of Sprint and Clearwire, the carriers are being dragged kicking and screaming to MVNOs – they simply have no choice.

“Our view on AT&T and Verizon is that they come to wholesale very begrudgingly and they will do only as much as the market forces them to,” Noss said. “We believe that ‘necessary evil’ would better describe their view of MVNOs than ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’. … the incumbents will only be as flexible as the market forces them to be.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Reno Martin

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• A look back at mobile in the third quarter

My colleague, Kevin Fitchard wasn’t overly impressed by sales numbers for Sprint’s iPhone — 1.5 million last quarter – but I view them a little differently. Verizon has nearly twice customer base of Sprint and sold roughly double the number of iPhones last quarter: 3.2 million. Based on that, I’d say that Sprint’s iPhone sales are at least proportionally comparable to its main CDMA rival. Still, others wonder why someone would buy a Sprint iPhone at all.

I just don't understand why anyone would buy an iPhone 4S on a CDMA network like Sprint unless it's a rural coverage thing…—
Jim Baker (@jnb65) April 25, 2012

My response to that was likely the same as Hesse’s would be: The unlimited data plan is a very likely factor, regardless of the slower 3G speeds. Jim Baker does raise a valid point on the speeds and responded back to me that most folks don’t hit their monthly caps anyway, so the “unlimited” benefit of Sprint’s plans is muted. Perhaps, but that may change as apps use more data and consumers turn to larger screened, high-resolution phones to stream video content.

Regardless of what Baker and I think, current and potential Sprint customers will rejoice over Hesse’s confirmation that unlimited plans for the iPhone will continue into the LTE era. In a conversation with Kevin Fitchard, he noted that this really shouldn’t be a surprise. Sprint will gain network efficiencies with LTE in lieu of CDMA. Even though consumers will use the network more, it will be better equipped to handle greater demand.

Based on a TechHog article from earlier this month, Sprint had already confirmed that unlimited LTE plans would be available for the LG Viper, an Android handset, but if there was any doubt on the iPhone plans, you can dismiss it. And if Apple does offer an LTE iPhone for Sprint — which could be tricky because of the frequencies Sprint plans to use for its network — all of the U.S. operators will be competing more directly on price. I suspect Sprint will sell an even greater share of iPhones as compared to AT&T and Verizon at that point.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• U.S. Wireless Data Market: Q4 and Year-End 2008
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Mobile Q4: The scramble for spectrum continues

The Wi-Fi hotspots aren’t the usual access points you find in coffee shops and airport terminals. Rather, they’re embedded in the Freebox Internet gateways of its DSL and fiber-to-the-home customers throughout France. The network has been around since 2009, when customers first began agreeing to share part of their broadband access with other Iliad customers. But until now, Free’s new and fast-growing base of smartphone customers hasn’t been able to tap into that huge resource – at least not automatically.

Free Mobile customers with one of its standard plans (€16, or U.S. $21, for Freebox subscribers and €20 for others), will now be able to configure their phones to automatically connect to any Wi-Fi hotspot in the Freebox community, gaining unlimited data access and VoIP calling. Rather than forcing customers to locate SSIDs and enter passwords, the device’s SIM card automatically authenticates and links to the network. No word yet on whether Iliad will extend hotspot access to its lower-tier plans, which scale all the way down €2 a month, but you would think opening up the network to all customers has to be in Free’s roadmap.

By leaning heavily on Wi-Fi, Free can offload enormous amounts of traffic that would normally traverse HSPA+ networks, where capacity is scarce and bandwidth expensive to deliver. In fact, Free has probably been taking it in the teeth for the last three months, since its new data-hungry subscribers have all been relying primarily on 3G for access. Free’s HSPA+ footprint is still limited so it’s had to lean heavily on the networks of its wholesale mobile provider Orange. While Free has placed a 3 GB cap on 3G data, it must have racked up some huge data bills in the last few months.

With the Wi-Fi network active for mobile, Free can relieve those 3G networks of much of their data burden. Of course, the strategy only works if customers are in range of a Freebox hotspot, which means Wi-Fi’s primary beneficiaries will be in urban areas. But urban areas are also precisely where the greatest demand for mobile broadband exists. And 4 million hotspots provide a lot of extra capacity.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• New solutions for the evolving mobile network
• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010-2015

The move affects the dwindling number of customers who are still on AT&T’s unlimited plans, which it phased out in 2010 in favor of tiered data plans that charge you extra should you surpass those limits. Around the same time, it also started reducing the download speeds of users who exceeded a vague amount that was defined as more than the data consumed by “the top 5 percent” of its customers. It’s worth noting that AT&T lost a small-claims court case last week over throttling, which could have prompted other customers to launch their own suits.

In practice, the loosely defined limit worked out to about 2GB of data a month, which is definitely on the high end but curiously lower than what AT&T allows you to consume with no throttling (3GB) on its new mid-level tiered plan. AT&T has now brought its older unlimited data plans in line with its new tiered plans: as our Kevin Fitchard pointed out last month, the former policy didn’t really make any sense.

According to Nielsen, the heaviest smartphone data users in the U.S.–those aged 25-34–used an average of 578MB a month in the third quarter of 2011, so these caps offer a lot of headroom for the average user. But data consumption is growing sharply, especially as more and more people start watching video on their mobile devices: AT&T told its customers that they’ll blow through about 308MB in an hour by streaming HD video over its network.

This likely won’t end confusion over AT&T’s policies either, given its short-sighted decision to brand both its HSPA+ network and its LTE network as “4G” networks. If you’ve got a “4G” HSPA+ smartphone, you get 3GBs a month before throttling kicks in, 2GBs less than a “4G” LTE phone is allowed. Should make for some fun conversations in AT&T retail stores and call centers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• Report: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech

Republic, the cellular arm of Bandwidth.com, launched last month with a bang, marketing $19-a-month unlimited voice, text and bandwidth plan. That sounds nuts but Republic had a unique strategy. It planned to make extensive use of public and private Wi-Fi to offload not only its data traffic, but calls and SMS as well. The details, however, were in the fine print.

Since Republic is a mobile operator it needed a cellular network to connect customers when out of range of Wi-Fi, so it contracted with Sprint to buy voice and data capacity on its CDMA network. Those wholesale minutes and bytes cost Republic money, and the more of them a customer uses the more likely Republic’s $19-a-month bargain turns into a loss-making machine. So it instituted something called a cellular usage index (CUI), which used an ever-evolving set of byzantine rules to determine what combination of voice minutes, text messages and megabytes warranted Republic booting customers off its network.

As you might expect this led to a lot of confusion and anger among Republic’s customers (or members as it calls them), so on Thursday Republic posted a refreshingly honest blog entry acknowledging that the usage index wasn’t working and announcing its plans to go truly unlimited. Republic general manager Brian Dally wrote:

This is what being in beta is really all about. We’re here to learn and innovate or fail trying. And as we’ve said before, we’re not here to sell you but to build a new wireless business together with you. You helped us realize that we didn’t get this right on our first try with the CUI, that we can and should do better.

…Rather than revising our fair use policy, we’ve decided not to have one at all. There will simply be no thresholds, and no risk of losing service. We’re doing away with all of that to keep all of the focus instead on where it really belongs: Creating a new wireless future together. A future that is simple to understand, unfettered to use, and an amazing value for all. That’s what we started down this path to do. That’s where the power of this vibrant community, dynamic Wi-Fi ecosystem and revolutionary technology should be invested. We’re all-in.

There is a catch, but a perfectly reasonable one. Republic said that the unlimited plan is technically in the beta stage, meaning it’s still determining if the concept is economically viable. “We won’t end beta until we either achieve economic sustainability or become convinced that doing so is impossible,” the Dally said.

I wish Dally and Republic the best of luck, and laud them for their willingness to test the boundaries of unlimited in a very public experiment. But I’m not very confident they can pull it off. Other MVNOs have tried and failed. H2O Wireless was forced to cap off its unlimited data plan within a few months of launching it. Sprint is the only major operator with an unlimited service, and it charges a lot more than $19 a month for it.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What to watch in mobile in 2013
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• Mobile Q4: The scramble for spectrum continues

While H2O does sell some phones, one of its biggest attractions is its SIM-only service, allowing customers to take almost any unlocked GSM phone onto its network, including the iPhone and Android devices. Owned by Locus Telecommunications, H2O is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) using AT&T’s GSM and high-speed packet access (HSPA) networks, which should have been a good indication unlimited data wasn’t going to work. AT&T was the first operator to rein in unlimited plans, requiring new customers to sign up for a 200 MB or 2 GB smartphone data buckets. If AT&T can’t (or won’t) make unlimited data work, it’s highly unlikely one of its MVNOs could.

H2O would be forced to pay AT&T by the MB, while its customers consumed it at a flat rate. That may not have been a big issue when H2O primarily was selling its customers feature phones, which don’t engage in the data orgies of their smartphone counterparts. But as H2O started selling smartphones like the Palm Pixi Plus on its own, and customers started bringing BlackBerry, Nokia and especially iPhone and Android devices onto the network, data consumption on those plans must have skyrocketed.

Getting hard to find a decent unlimited plan

These days, there’s no such thing as unlimited without an asterisk. T-Mobile throttles back connection speeds if you exceed a set cap in a given month. While both AT&T and Verizon Wireless have grandfathered in their unlimited data customers, both have now implemented ‘soft caps’ on their consumption: If any customer’s gross tonnage of MBs in any given month reaches a point either operator considers excessive, their speeds are throttled back for the remainder of the billing period. Some MVNOs like Republic Wireless try to work around the restrictions on unlimited usage by aggressively using Wi-Fi, but ultimately when customers move back onto the cellular network,, their MBs are counted.

The one big exception is Sprint. The operator claims its unlimited 3G and 4G smartphone plans are one of its biggest competitive differentiators, but Sprint may be forced to change its tune once the data pressures from the new iPhone and its in-suspended-animation 4G build come to bear. There are also a few smaller holdouts. MetroPCS still offers unlimited data plans over its new LTE network, though its smaller line up of devices and the limitations of its networks provide some constraints.

MVNO Simple Mobile, which, like H2O, offers a bring-your-own phone service, also offers a $60 unlimited talk, text and data plan, using T-Mobile’s networks rather than AT&T’s. Simple, however, does have an ingrained advantage. There are relatively few smartphones out there that can tap into the frequency bands of T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network. A customer would have to secure an unlocked version of one those devices if they want to access anything besides T-Mobile’s slow-paced EGDE service. Still, some customer is going to get his or her hands on an unlocked version of one of T-Mobile’s new 42 Mbps Android phones, which would blow that unlimited plan out of the water.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• Sprint’s tightrope walk: finding a balance for its network modernization plan

We’ve gotten tips and seen on Twitter that some folks are running into trouble using AT&T’s upgrader. Specifically, they’re seeing a message suggesting that their unlimited data plans won’t carry over with the purchase of an iPhone 4S. Luckily, that’s not true. If you ordered through Apple, you probably didn’t even run into any trouble; its site makes fairly clear that those upgrading can keep their unlimited data.

If, however, you went through AT&T’s site, you may have encountered a notice telling you you require a different Data Add-on Plan, as in the image below from tipster Chris Guthrie. You sort of do, but in name only. If you continue through the process on AT&T’s site, you’ll be fine. AT&T admits the site is a bit confusing, but are working on making it better.

It’s understandable that people would covet their unlimited data plans, since like an exotic species of rainforest flower, there might be a time soon when they go completely extinct. The iPhone 4S might be even more data-dependent too; new voice-activated personal assistant app Siri requires an active internet connection to do its thing, according to Apple promotional materials, and though it should only really sip data, a lot of sipping could add up.

If you’re still uncertain about whether or not your unlimited data plan will survive, feel free to give AT&T’s support department a call, but they’ll tell you the same thing: your plans are safe, mobile data fiends.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• A look back at mobile in the third quarter