Smartphone data shake-up: The end of 'unlimited'

Americans like living large. We have all-you-can-eat buffets and all-you-can-stream entertainment. And until recently, we had a virtually unlimited trough of mobile data to digest on our always-available smartphones.

At this point, though, all but one of the major U.S. carriers now limit smartphone data usage in one way or another. AT&T and Verizon charge if you go over your allotted number of bytes, while T-Mobile slows your speed down to a crawl once you've crossed its carefully measured line. Only Sprint continues to offer truly unlimited data plans to new subscribers. (Some lucky users on the other networks are still grandfathered in to unlimited plans; we'll see how long that lasts.)

"This trend is happening all over the world," says Thomas Husson, a mobile analyst at Forrester Research. "Carriers need to monetize their core assets and avoid the risk of a few users saturating their networks."

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