That's been my experience in the US as well. On EDGE/EVDO or even early days of 3G, unlimited plans were extremely common and fairly cheap. When 3G became more established and 4G/LTE started rolling out, 2GB is now the normal with massive increases in prices as you add more ($10/GB is common).

Strange, in Denmark they have been raised. You can get up to 1 TB mobile 4g lte plans for 70 usd (including 25% vat - http://www.3.dk/Privat/Mobilt-bredband/Abonnement/MB-FRI/).

Will they?

My 3100mAh Galaxy Note II has 4G, and the battery life is noticeably worse than my old 1200mAh iPhone 3G.

Battery tech has long been one of the biggest limiting factors in mobile tech, and I'm not quite sure that advances in energy density are moving as quickly as everything else. Which means I think that batteries are slowly lasting less long as energy usage of new features consistently outstrips improvements in the tech.

Remember when phones used to last a week or a month? Now we're lucky to get a day, day and a half.

The "innovation" so far consists of making phones thicker so that they can house a bigger battery.

but don't you only get arund 500 Mb/month of "high speed data" and then your back down to 2G/EDGE/etc?