The Truth About LTE

Carriers Doing Away with Unlimited

Many cell phone companies and data providers are requiring their users to move from their unlimited data plan to a restricted data plan when they upgrade their phone plan.  The new data plans restrict the amount of data per plan and no longer provide an unlimited option.  But, what is the truth about the LTE plan?  Many providers claim that LTE is much better and faster than 3G.  And that is half true...



The move from 3G to LTE has its benefits, but it also has its drawbacks.  In exchange for the faster data speeds, you may have to start watching your data pretty closely.  With the new upgrades, your data allowance is much lower and restricted.  Your data just became much more valuable.  Because the LTE data speeds are so much faster than the 3G speeds, the amount of data that is used is much higher.  When browsing the internet on your smartphone, the first thing you will notice is your desired page loads much faster than before, which may incline you to browse longer - unknowingly. You may also decide to stream videos and music because the quality is much better than before.

In a recent post done by Mashable, they released the following:

Recently, we tested a few apps and features using the iPhone 5 to see if there was really a difference in data usage between 3G and LTE. We ran Pandora, FaceTime and Netflix for six minutes to get a good idea of the apps’ normal data usage. The numbers below combine the data that was sent and received during the testing period for each app.

As you can see in the chart above, there’s one big problem here: While most of the usage between 3G and LTE is almost the same, Netflix seems to be the biggest data hog.

 So, what do you think about the new limited data? Has anyone experienced the high speeds of LTE?

Let us know!