Verizon (Engadget’s parent company) will keep offering additional mobile data for a while longer to help people deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. The carrier is adding another 15GB of LTE data to regular and small business shared data plans, including hotspots, for the entire month of May. You won’t have to do a thing — it’ll be applied automatically.
As before, this is ultimately part of a broader push by US carriers to keep people online while they’re staying at home, whether it’s for work or to catch up on TV shows. The May extension suggests that Verizon doesn’t expect lockdowns to lift quickly, and that it would rather hand out automatic extensions than face an uproar if stay-at-home measures continue significantly longer.