Following a year of intense competition as US telecoms raced to one-up each other on new unlimited data plans, the promotional benefits are beginning to dry up. Cell carriers are now pulling back on deals to try to shore up revenue to offset the cost of large mergers and acquisitions and network upgrades.

According to a consumer price index for wireless service put together by the US Labor Department, the cost of a cell plan rose by 0.3 percent in June 2018 from the same time a year ago, as reported by The Wall Street Journal today. That’s the first price increase the index has recorded in two years.

The primary price increase method for US telecoms is upping the cost of unlimited data plans, which already come with built-in restrictions like data caps that, when exceeded, throttle a customer’s bandwidth speeds. Nearly every major carrier now offers multiple “unlimited” data plans, all of which use the marketing benefit of the term “unlimited” without actually offering customers limitless access to high-speed LTE service. Just last week, Sprint introduced a new unlimited plan with better benefits and a higher price, and it made the existing unlimited plan worse for the money in a bid to incentivize people to upgrade.

US cell carriers are raising prices to offset the cost of acquisitions and network upgrades

There is a reason for the price increases that goes beyond telecoms wanting to improve their bottom lines. According to trade association CTIA, about 95 percent of all adults in the US own a cellphone and used a combined 15.7 billion gigabytes of data in 2017, a nearly fourfold increase from three years ago.

To hold on to customers and attract new ones while simultaneously keeping a handle on network load, carriers are increasing prices and trying to get customers to use less data. T-Mobile does this by exempting streaming video on its network so long as a customer agrees to watch the video at a lower resolution, a move called zero-rating that has rankled net neutrality advocates who see it as a form of network prioritization. AT&T and Verizon have followed suit.

Then there are administrative fees, a widely detested and largely ambiguous line item tacked onto US customers’ bills that let telecoms charge for things like “cell site maintenance and interconnection between carriers.” At least, that’s how AT&T put it when it more than doubled its fee from $0.76 to $1.99 last month.

While perhaps trivial to some customers on a monthly basis, the costs do add up and are projected to earn AT&T an additional $800 million in annual revenue. Given that AT&T just spent $85 billion acquiring Time Warner, the company certainly has revenue to recoup. Sprint also raised its admin fee earlier this year, though it went largely unnoticed, in part because it was only a 25 percent increase, from $1.99 to $2.50.