On July 12, AT&T announced that a severe data breach allowed bad actors to steal “records of calls and texts of nearly all of AT&T’s cellular customers” between May 1 and October 31, 2022. Records from January 2, 2023, were also leaked. AT&T says that the contents of calls and texts were not part of this breach. We’re currently evaluating the severity of this leak and how it might affect our picks for this guide.
If you haven’t looked at what your cell phone bill might be under a new plan or on a new service, you should check now. In recent years prices have come down and data allocations have gone up, especially among the dozens of smaller carriers reselling services from the big three. But as always, most deals come with a catch.
There isn’t one carrier or plan that we can recommend for everyone, but T-Mobile’s Magenta plan is best for unlimited data, and AT&T’s Unlimited Extra plan offers the most comprehensive coverage. We also have picks for people with more specific needs.
I’ve covered the wireless industry since the late 1990s. I’ve tested smartphones and cell phone plans from all the major carriers—the historic foursome of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon, plus Nextel before then—for the Washington Post, USA Today, CNN Money, Discovery News, VentureBeat, and others, and I now cover tech and telecom issues for Fast Company, PCMag, and other sites, including trade publications like Light Reading and FierceTelecom. And in July 2021, I put in more than a thousand miles of drive testing from Baltimore to Atlanta for PCMag’s Fastest Mobile Networks project, following that with almost 1,700 more miles of drive testing in the 2022 edition of that project.
We limited this guide to the most widely used national options—starting with the three biggest nationwide carriers and their prepaid services and subsidiaries, and then adding services that have ranked high in surveys conducted by sites and organizations such as PCMag, the American Customer Satisfaction Index, and J.D. Power.
We excluded contenders available only in parts of the US, including the regional carrier U.S. Cellular and the resold services of cable firms such as Comcast and Spectrum, which require subscriptions to their residential broadband to get their advertised pricing or to sign up at all. Last, we cut prepaid services that required separate purchases of data, texts, or voice minutes to meet any of our monthly usage quotas.
That process left us with the following services to assess:
We calculated the cost of three typical bundles of smartphone service for every provider: moderate use at 3 GB of data; a for-most-people scenario requiring unlimited data for the phone but with no more than 3 GB of mobile hotspot use; and a heavy-use case with unlimited on-phone data plus 10 GB of mobile hotspot use. These totals are higher than in previous editions of this guide because typical data usage has gone up substantially: Circana analyst Brad Akyuz told us that the firm’s research showed US median smartphone cellular data usage in the second quarter of 2023 had hit 10.8 GB per month, with average use (skewed by extreme cases) at 17.9 GB.
The wireless industry has found so many ways to interpret “unlimited” that we’ve had to think about what “unlimited” means. Some unlimited plans offer no “priority data,” so your connection can slow down because of network congestion even if you haven’t used much data yourself. Other plans advise that service may get slower above a preset threshold of used data—often without defining those slower speeds. Some of these asterisked unlimited plans represent good values for all but the most intensive users. But we do require at least 25 GB of full-speed data per line in the for-most-people scenario (“full-speed” meaning no restrictions on what parts of a carrier’s 5G network you can use) and 50 GB per line in the heavy-use scenario.
We also require unlimited messages and voice minutes, but almost all services now offer that.
A wireless network’s coverage and performance usually vary considerably by location, and they also change over time. To get the most balanced picture possible of the big three carriers (and the services that resell their networks), we consulted independently conducted surveys of wireless-network coverage and performance from Opensignal, PCMag, and RootMetrics. In our view, consistently good performance in the places where most people live, work, and visit was a higher priority than exceptionally fast download speeds if the coverage to access those speeds was spotty.
Our cost estimates assumed that anybody who wanted to use their phone’s mobile-hotspot feature to share their LTE or 5G bandwidth for any sustained period wanted to do so at its full speed. We assumed that most people wouldn’t use up more than 3 GB of data per month with this feature, but we also included an intensive scenario that assumed up to 10 GB a month in mobile-hotspot use.
In addition, we crunched those same numbers for shared-use plans for two and four lines, because many Wirecutter readers have asked to see comparisons of family pricing.
If a plan offered a lower rate for enabling autopay or paying for a year in advance, or if it included loyalty discounts that cut your bill over time (as Verizon Prepaid has offered since 2020), we factored in those options. We did not, however, count deals that required trading in a phone or porting over a number.
Cell providers have spent the past few years transitioning from 4G (or LTE, for Long Term Evolution) service toward the 5G standard—and talking endlessly about how great 5G is. The reality is that 5G can be immensely faster, but its performance depends on which frequency band it runs on, whether your carrier has deployed 5G on one of the faster bands, and whether you’re in a spot where your carrier’s 5G network reaches you on one of the faster bands.
Think of a layer cake: The bottom layer is low-band 5G, which resides on the same frequencies as LTE and isn’t much faster but offers about the same coverage. Mid-band 5G, on higher frequencies that yield faster speeds with somewhat reduced coverage, is the middle layer. Millimeter-wave 5G, on frequencies that nobody tried to use for wireless service until 5G’s advent, delivers extremely fast speeds over extremely short ranges, making it the tiny top layer of the cake that almost nobody gets to eat at a wedding.
In fewer words: You may find that the most widely available form of 5G at your carrier doesn’t offer speeds much faster than 4G.
You can read more about the transition to 5G and how it all works in our explainer.
If more data is more important to you than coverage in non-metropolitan areas, the Magenta plan offers a great price for unlimited data on a strong network. Plus, T-Mobile has the best 5G service and international plans.
If data is your priority—meaning, you want a fast network connection that you can use to download and upload in volume—consider the T-Mobile Magenta plan. T-Mobile’s primary unlimited-data offering represents a better value proposition for most people’s needs than AT&T’s or Verizon’s comparable plan, and the carrier’s rollout of 5G has made an already good network considerably better in a steadily expanding share of the country.
Magenta is the best unlimited-data plan based on price alone. Magenta costs $70 a month for unlimited on-phone data. Translation: T-Mobile says you have to exceed 100 GB of data before it might slow your connection to ease network congestion. That’s double the allotment on AT&T’s comparable plan, which costs $5 more, but less than the unlimited priority-data allocation on Verizon’s closest equivalent, which costs $10 more. At both competitors, those rates don’t include the taxes and fees that T-Mobile folds into its advertised rate. (Two lines of Magenta cost $60 each, and four run $35 each.) You can use only 5 GB of that data for mobile-hotspot sharing, which is less than what the competition offers on slightly more expensive plans, but it’s also more than enough for occasional use.
If you’re 55 or older, T-Mobile has discounts that make this carrier an even better choice, slashing the cost of Magenta to $50 for one line and $35 each for two, three, or four lines.
T-Mobile has the best 5G coverage. All the data allotment in the world is unhelpful if the connection is too slow to use, but T-Mobile’s network has jumped ahead of the pack, in part because of its 5G frequencies. T-Mobile’s mid-band spectrum offering provides impressively fast 5G with better coverage than the almost-as-speedy C-band and much faster but far shorter-range millimeter-wave of AT&T and Verizon. This mid-band 5G, which T-Mobile markets as Ultra Capacity 5G, is much speedier than the low-band 5G that fills out its network and constitutes the most widely available form of 5G among its competitors.
The difference has become increasingly obvious in third-party tests, as well as in our own evaluations of Wi-Fi hotspots from the big three carriers.
Opensignal’s crowdsourced 5G-specific tests from July 2023 showed a significant advantage for T-Mobile (outlined in the table below), more than double Verizon’s and AT&T’s download averages; in addition, T-Mobile’s 5G was available more than half the time, compared with just over 20% for AT&T and under 10% for Verizon. Ookla’s Speedtest showed comparable leads in Q3 2023 for T-Mobile in median download speeds (163.59 megabits per second versus 75.68 Mbps on Verizon and 72.64 Mbps on AT&T) and 5G-only median download speeds (221.57 Mbps, with Verizon at 153.79 Mbps and AT&T at 101.55 Mbps).
PCMag gave T-Mobile its first-ever fastest mobile network ranking in 2021. The carrier maintained its position as the best mobile network in 2022. And RootMetrics’s latest drive-testing-based State of the Mobile Union report, for the first half of 2023, found T-Mobile to have the fastest median download speeds: 213.2 Mbps, almost triple Verizon’s 77.9 Mbps and AT&T’s 77.3 Mbps. But RootMetrics gave top overall honors to AT&T for offering more consistent service outside urban areas.
| Median 5G download | 5G availability | |
| T-Mobile | 195.5 Mbps | 57.9% |
| Verizon | 96.3 Mbps | 9.8% |
| AT&T | 80 Mbps | 20.7% |
Opensignal’s July 2023 report showed that, on the median, T-Mobile’s 5G network was faster and more available to its customers than those of the other two national carriers. Source: Opensignal
AT&T and Verizon each launched faster 5G service on C-band frequencies in January 2022 and have since taken this midband coverage nationwide past relatively small launch areas (just eight for AT&T [PDF] and 46 mostly urban markets for Verizon), T-Mobile’s advantage has persisted.
Magenta offers the best bonuses for frequent travelers. Magenta includes international roaming, and although it’s limited to speeds around 256 Kbps, I’ve found it to be more than adequate for email and basic browsing. You also get free texting, 25¢-per-minute calling, and the ability to use your phone in Canada or Mexico with no roaming charges for up to 5 GB a month, even on 5G. And it includes an hour of free in-flight Wi-Fi—and full-flight connectivity four times a year—on your phone on Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines.
T-Mobile also offers four higher-end unlimited plans, but Magenta is best for most people. Go5G costs $75 for a single line, $65 each for two lines, or $45 each for four lines, and it triples the hotspot allocation to 15 GB. It also doubles the high-speed roaming cap in Canada and Mexico to 10 GB. Magenta Max ($85 for one line, $70 each for two lines, $43 each for four lines) provides only 5 GB of high-speed international roaming, but that’s in all of the 215-plus countries where T-Mobile offers its free-but-slow roaming; Magenta Max also offers unlimited priority data, 4K UHD streaming video, and a full 40 GB of mobile-hotspot use. The Go5G Plus plan offers 50 GB of mobile hotspot and bundles Netflix and Apple TV+ for $90 on one line, $75 each on two lines, or $55 each on four lines. People who were already set on watching those streaming services might find that Go5G Plus offers some net savings in their combined wireless and entertainment budget, but otherwise it looks like T-Mobile’s least relevant plan besides the new, $100 Go5G Next, which offers a new phone every year for compulsive upgraders.
T-Mobile’s discount for those 55 and older drops the cost of all those plans dramatically: On a single line, Magenta runs just $50, Go5G costs $55, Magenta Max is $65, and Go5G Plus costs $70, with multiple-line scenarios offering comparable savings.
T-Mobile’s rural coverage lags behind that of AT&T and Verizon. Coverage from those carriers remains more comprehensive than T-Mobile’s—as I saw on rural roads in the Southeast and Northwest while doing drive testing for PCMag—but thanks to the past few years of improvement in T-Mobile’s network, you’d have to get into fairly remote areas to notice that difference. Before choosing a plan, determine whether your likely travel patterns are more apt to make T-Mobile’s rural limitations an ongoing problem.
International roaming is complicated if you haven’t paid off your phone. Although T-Mobile’s international roaming costs much less than AT&T’s and Verizon’s international options, you may have to pay those charges if you buy your phone from T-Mobile on an installment-payment plan, as this carrier keeps such handsets locked until you pay off your balance—or conclude the term on a free-upgrade deal.
T-Mobile has a history of data breaches, with its largest in August 2022. That breach affected some 40 million customers—I was among them. I thought about dropping T-Mobile, but the telecom industry’s general indifference to the concept of data minimization left me with little reason to think I’d fare much better in the long run elsewhere. That history makes T-Mobile’s recent move to limit its autopay discount to payments made from a bank account or debit card look even more distasteful, although its enforcement of this policy seems to be uneven so far.
T-Mobile management does not seem immune to wireless-industry jerk behavior. Since 2013, T-Mobile has led with an “Un-Carrier” brand based on dumping dumb wireless-industry habits. But T-Mobile has scored enough own goals–for example, a plan to move people on some older plans to more expensive options that the carrier has since abandoned–to remind subscribers that they need to watch their monthly statements and other customer notices as much as they would with any other carrier.
