Sprint is excited to announce that it’s making its mobile plan worse

With the headway the T-Mobile-Sprint merger is making, one wonders why Sprint doesn’t just call it a day and coast along until the deal is approved. But here we are, with a press release on Sprint’s Newsroom blog announcing some big changes to its “unlimited” plan.

Despite Sprint’s excitement about revealing these changes, it’s hard not to notice that what the company is really doing is taking its current all-encompassing plan and splitting it into two: one crappier version of the current plan at the current price, and one more expensive option that adds a few more features over the current plan.

In other words, Sprint is raising the price of its current unlimited plan by $10, throwing in a few more features, and hoping you won’t notice. Then it’s adding a new crappy plan underneath to make you think the more expensive option is worth it.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Here’s the breakdown of the differences between the new “Basic” plan and the current unlimited plan (shown in parentheses):

• Unlimited Basic – $60 per month (no price change)
• LTE hotspot data is 500MB per month (was 10GB per month)
• Video streaming quality limited to 480p (previously 1080p)
• Comes with Hulu with commercials (no change)
• International roaming included (new feature not in current plan)

And here’s the new “Plus” plan:

• Unlimited Plus – $70 per month ($10 increase)
• LTE hotspot data is 15GB per month (was 10GB per month)
• Video streaming quality limited to 1080p (no change)
• Comes with Hulu with commercials (no change)
• Comes with basic subscription to TIDAL (new feature not in current plan)
• International roaming included (new feature not in current plan)

For both plans, Sprint is doing something nice: it’s raising its limit on unlimited data (it pains me to write that) from 23GB per month to 50GB per month, which is the same limit as T-Mobile. Most users will never hit 50GB of data per month, but if they do, they’ll be throttled.

Sprint now joins the other three major American mobile carriers in offering multiple “unlimited” plans, that actually have definable limits. The new plans will be available starting tomorrow, July 13. To lessen the blow, Sprint is offering a $50 prepaid MasterCard to the first ten people through the door of a Sprint store tomorrow to create a new line on one of these new plans.

If you still have the current Sprint Unlimited Freedom plan, you can keep it for now, as Sprint makes no mention of forcing current subscribers to join one of these new plans.

NEXT: Sprint pulling its $15 Unlimited mega deal after just one week citing high demand