Prepaid Plans Data Throttling

dearwarsaw

Hello, world. I have the 3 Gb prepaid plan which is giving me double the data. A few questions:

1. What are the regular download speeds for prepaid plans?

2. It is my understanding that video streaming is capped at 480p. Is there a way to uncap it?

Thanks!

Accepted answers

Doggo

You can't cap a streaming resolution no matter what marketers say. Bump up the resolution of your choice in the apps settings you are streaming with. Youtube has it embedded in the video player.

All that 480 / 720 mess means is Verizon is allowing less bandwidth to go through, not that it's actually limited to 480p.

All comments

Verizon_Support

Making sure that you are on the correct plan for your needs is definitely important, and I can definitely help answer your questions about your Prepaid plan today.Your 3GB Prepaid plan allows you up to 3GB of data usage per month at 4G LTE speeds, and then 600kbps after you have used your monthly plan data. The download speeds for 4G LTE coverage are from 5-12mbps, and from 2-5mbps for upload. The reason your Video streaming quality is set to 480p is because HD streaming (720p, and 1080p) would require more data, and would cause you to run out of data significantly faster than your current usage.

AlfredoR_VZW

Doggo

You can't cap a streaming resolution no matter what marketers say. Bump up the resolution of your choice in the apps settings you are streaming with. Youtube has it embedded in the video player.

All that 480 / 720 mess means is Verizon is allowing less bandwidth to go through, not that it's actually limited to 480p.

Ann154

Can one actually tell the difference between 480 and 720 on a phone?

dearwarsaw

vzw_customer_support,

So I've been doing a little more research on this. The initial reason why I asked about download speeds being capped at 480p is because of the plan detail information Verizon provides for each of the 4G prepaid plans.

Data speeds

DVD-quality streaming (up to 480p) on smartphones. In times of congestion, your data may be temporarily slower than other traffic.

Now that I've reviewed everybody's answers I see how this really works. I personally have not experienced throttling but was curious about it. I always play YouTube videos on 1080p without any issues.

dearwarsaw

Ann154,

There's definitely a noticeable difference between those 2 resolutions but it might also depend on the phone you're using. I have an iPhone XS.