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Cricket Wireless cast off an aging set of phone plans, replacing them with a lineup that includes more data and lowers the cost to use a phone as a mobile hotspot.
The new plans announced Friday start at $30 a month after a $5 auto-pay credit, the same as in the previous lineup (as preserved by the Internet Archive). But this “Sensible 10GB” plan includes 10GB of full-speed data instead of 5GB, with the option of paying $10 for 1GB more; as before, your connection slows to 128kbps above that cap.
Unlimited-on-phone data now costs $35, down from $40 in the old lineup, although this “Select Unlimited” offering is reserved to new lines.
And where the prior lineup required paying $60 to get an “unlimited” plan including mobile-hotspot use, that now comes with a $45 “Smart Unlimited” plan. The hotspot quota remains at 15GB; the current plan also still includes roaming in Canada and Mexico, which smaller print in the press release says does not cover 5G speeds.
This $45 plan, however, lowers included cloud storage–not via the usual suspects like Google or Microsoft but via a service called myPhotoVault–from 150GB to 100GB. And it doesn’t throw in HBO Max Basic With Ads, which you can sign up for directly for $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year.
Cricket’s new plans top out with a $55 “Supreme Unlimited” offering that ups mobile-hotspot use to 50GB, increases cloud storage to 150GB and includes the with-ads version of the streaming video service previous known as Max and before then HBO Max, HBO Now and HBO Go.
All these prices include taxes and fees; multiple-line discounts are available, but those don’t provide auto-pay credits.
Cricket, which AT&T bought in 2014 and continues to run as a separate brand, had made minor tweaks to its plans in recent years, but it says it last rewrote the entire lineup in 2017.
These changes underscore how much cheap prepaid plans can depart from the postpaid plans that draw the most subscribers and attention. AT&T, for example, ratcheted up its postpaid plans in January 2024. Although that 99-cent increase, which delivered larger hotspot allocations, now looks modest compared to the rate hikes Verizon has implemented since or T-Mobile’s wholescale replacement of cheaper, taxes-and-fees-included plans with pricier “Experience” offerings that assume massive levels of hotspot use.
The importance of mobile-hotspot allocations in plans marketed as “unlimited,” in turn, underscores a missed opportunity in the broadband labels that the Federal Communications Commission enacted in 2022: While they require wireless services to break out a variety of fine-print limits, fees and policies in a nutrition-label-style format, hotspot caps aren’t among them.