Cricket Wireless drops the price of its unlimited plan to $60 a month

Cricket Wireless, the no-contract carrier that’s owned by AT&T, is the latest in the US to make some changes to its unlimited data plan. The company revealed today that the price of that plan will be going down by $10, from $70 to $60 a month.

If a customer adds more than one line to his or her unlimited plan, they will get some extra savings. A discount of $10 is included when a second line is added, and there’s a $20 discount for a third line. A $30 discount is applied when a fourth line is included, which means Cricket will charge $180 a month for an unlimited plan for four lines. A fifth line can also be added for an additional $40 a month. Cricket’s unlimited plan also includes free calls from the US to Canada and Mexico and free texting to 38 countries.

While that’s good news for people who don’t want to mess with a contract plan, there is some bad news. As we have reported before, customers who use 22GB of data before their monthly billing cycle ends may see their download speeds throttled, if they are in what Cricket considers to be a congested network area. That is supposed to go into effect on April 2. It’s likely that the vast majority of customers won’t be affected by this change, but if you use a lot of data a month you might want to be aware that your speed could be cut down.

Of course, this is just the latest example of a wireless carrier either introducing a new unlimited plan for customers, or in this case modifying an existing one to stay competitive. This trend began in mid-February when Verizon Wireless surprised the industry by offering an unlimited plan after ditching them in 2011.

Cricket also confirmed today that it plans to add some new features to the network sometime in the near future. They include support for HD voice calls as wells as Wi-Fi calling. It’s also supposed to introduce a feature called Stream Mode, which will allow customers to stream some higher-definition videos at standard definition resolutions, which is supposed to help save data for people that still use plans with caps. This mode, which is also supposed to go live on April 2, will be able to be switched on or off at any time.