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Seeing "Comcast" and "rates" in the same sentence is often a prelude to a household telecom budget increase, but its new Xfinity Mobile wireless plans leave rates intact while increasing what subscribers get.
The new Premium Unlimited plan, which replaces the old Unlimited Plus plan, doubles premium data from 50GB to 100GB and doubles the mobile hotspot allocation from 15GB to 30GB. But Premium keeps the same $50 rate as Plus, a plan introduced by Comcast last April.
Premium also ups the resolution cap on streaming video from the 720p HD allowed under Plus to 4K Ultra HD, though it's not as if you would have any hope of appreciating those extra pixels of resolution on a phone’s screen.
(The contrast with T-Mobile introducing a new line of plans that will raise the cost of service for many subscribers is duly noted.)
Comcast’s press release also notes that Premium Unlimited subscribers can get up to gigabit speeds while on the company’s Wi-Fi network via its "PowerBoost" feature–if, per a Comcast support note, they use certain newer iPhone and Samsung Galaxy models.
Since launching Xfinity Mobile in 2017 based on resold Verizon Wireless network capacity, the Philadelphia cable giant has leaned on its vast and growing network of Wi-Fi hotspots—including those in the homes of its cable broadband subscribers—as a differentiating factor. Tuesday’s announcement boasted that more than 90% of Xfinity Mobile data traffic happens on Wi-Fi.
Comcast is also dangling trade-in incentives to persuade people to sign up for Premium Unlimited: an $830 credit for “the latest devices from Apple and Samsung” for trading in unspecified qualifying devices, plus the the option to get a discount of “up to $830 with an eligible trade-in” twice a year.
(Reminder: Xfinity Mobile, like most wireless carriers, locks devices that have installment-payment plans pending, so you’ll have to pay off any such balance on a new phone obtained via one of those deals before using an eSIM during an international trip.)
Premium Unlimited, first offered on sale last week, costs $30 a month extra for each additional line on an account. That’s also unchanged from Unlimited Plus.
Comcast’s plain old Unlimited plan remains unchanged at $40 a month, with 30GB of unlimited data (after which your connection gets cramped down to 1.5Mbps) and mobile-hotspot use limited to “3G speeds,” meaning 600kbps.
Meanwhile, Xfinity Mobile’s lower-usage By the Gig plan, in which you pay $20 for 1GB of data and then $20 for each additional fraction of a gigabyte, is now only available through Comcast’s “assisted sales and support channels.” Removing a rate plan from web orders, as T-Mobile did with its Magenta and Magena Max plans last year, often leads to the service dropping it entirely.
These Xfinity Mobile rates require a Comcast residential broadband subscription. But although the pricing and data caps of Comcast cable internet often draw fierce complaints from subscribers, many of those same customers seem far more cheerful about Xfinity Mobile: The service earned a score of 8.0 out of 10 in PCMag’s latest Readers’ Choice survey, good for seventh place and well above Verizon’s own postpaid service on that list.