With major US carriers Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile announcing their own "unlimited" plans, it helps to retain realistic expectations about the companies' new offerings. Unlimited access is the future, but it features its own brand of shortcomings.

As is my experience with Globe Visibility, a local HSDPA service that provides connectivity through a cellular network, the term "unlimited" is determined by the network's capacity. Once Visibility became popular, users started suffering from dropped connections, bigger deadspots, and general unreliability.

The problem, of course, was that Globe advertised unlimited wireless access, took on any comers, but apparently never bothered to increase their capacity. They promised unlimited plans, but are currently failing to deliver on unlimited connectivity.

So, let's hope that the US operators mentioned above have the literal capacity to back up their words.