Unlimited data
Unlimited, and we tell you where it stops.
No unlimited plan anywhere is genuinely unlimited, and anyone who says otherwise is relying on you not reading the terms. One major provider throttles at roughly 3 GB a day. Another does not publish a limit at all, and independent testing has measured it near 7 Mbps before throttling and under 1 Mbps after.
1 Mbps is enough for maps, messaging, email and a boarding pass. It is not enough for streaming video. Both of those sentences are true and printing them costs us nothing.
Should you buy unlimited at all?
Usually not. Most travellers use between 500 MB and 1 GB a day, so a metered wallet plan is cheaper and it does not expire. Unlimited is worth it when you are tethering a laptop, when you genuinely cannot predict the trip, or when you simply want to stop thinking. We would rather tell you that than sell you the bigger number.
What the throttle actually feels like
A throttle is a speed limit, not a switch. At 1 Mbps the connection stays up, the phone still says it has data, and nothing asks you to buy anything. What changes is how long things take: a map tile that appeared instantly now takes a beat, a photo sends in fifteen seconds instead of two, and a video call degrades to audio rather than dropping.
In practice the things travellers actually need at the end of a long day still work. Directions work. Messaging works. A boarding pass loads. A ride hailing app finds you a car. Email arrives, attachments take their time. What does not work is streaming video at any quality you would choose to watch, and a large upload will sit there long enough that you will stop watching it.
The allowance resets when the day rolls over, so a day where you tether a laptop through a long train journey does not cost you the following morning. Nothing carries a penalty, no overage appears on a bill, and there is no tier above this one to be upsold into. The only number that matters is the one on the buy button.
How to not hit the cap in the first place
Most people who reach 2 GB in a day did it without meaning to, and usually in one of three ways: a video app left on autoplay, a photo library backing up over cellular, or a laptop that decided the tethered connection was a good moment to download an operating system update.
Turning off cellular backup for photos, and letting large updates wait for wifi, removes most of it. Downloading maps for offline use before you leave the hotel removes a surprising amount more, because map data over a busy cell is both the slowest thing you will do and the thing you will do most often.
If you would rather not think about any of this, a metered wallet plan is the honest recommendation. Most travellers use between 500 MB and 1 GB a day, which is comfortably inside a wallet plan that costs less than a pass and does not expire. We sell both, we would rather you bought the right one, and the arithmetic above is the reason we print it.