Verizon ruffled some feathers last month when it was caught throttling Netflix on its LTE network. At the time the carrier said it was merely testing video optimization technology, and now we know why. Verizon has done away with its standard unlimited data plan, replacing it with three tiers of unlimited data. All of them include video throttling—in fact, you can't get 1080p video on phones on any of them.

The new unlimited plans are Go Unlimited, Beyond Unlimited, and Business Unlimited. Pricing for one line is $75 on Go and $85 on Beyond. The business plan is a little different; the price varies based on features, and you need to have at least 4 lines. Go and Beyond are the main consumer options, and there are a lot of limits for something called "unlimited."

The Go plan caps video streaming to 480p (720p on tablets) and hotspot speeds are limited to 600Kbps. A potentially larger headache is the network prioritization. Those on Go Unlimited can be throttled at any time when the network is congested—it doesn't matter how much data they've used in the current billing cycle. Beyond Unlimited only throttles in response to network congestion when you've used more than 22GB, but there are other problems. Video is still limited to 720p here (1080p on tablets), and the hotspot only does LTE speeds for 15GB. The Business variant has video capped at 480p, but the hotspot is full speed for 15GB.

So, there's no way to get 1080p streaming on phones anymore, which Verizon says you don't need anyway. I would contend that compression differences at 720p and 1080p are noticeable, but Verizon doesn't care. Verizon is so confident people won't mind that it's deploying video throttling for everyone. All Verizon's legacy plans will get the Beyond streaming limits—full HD video streaming on Verizon is only permitted on tablets, and the maximum for phones is 720p.

The new plans go into effect tomorrow, August 23rd.

Source: Verizon