Yankee Group: AT&T’s New Data Plans: Less Anytime, Anywhere Media

Say Goodbye to Unlimited Data Plans

As of June 7, new AT&T contracts for smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone, no longer offer unlimited data plans. Instead, AT&T offers two tiers of pricing for mobile data, consisting of:
• DataPlus Plan: $15 for 200 MB per month. Data users who exceed this limit may buy additional 200 MB chunks at $15 each.
• DataPro Plan: $25 for 2 GB per month. In this tier, each gigabyte in excess of 2 GB will cost the user $10.

Plus, AT&T finally added tethering support to the iPhone, enabling consumers to use their iPhones to link their laptops to the Internet. However, paying the $20 tethering fee doesn’t increase the 200 MB or 2 GB bandwidth caps. IPhone users who currently have unlimited data plans for $30 can keep them (as long as they continually renew them), even if they upgrade to the just-announced iPhone 4. However, new customers and customers who don’t currently have an unlimited plan in force have to choose from the new DataPlus and DataPro plans; unlimited data is no longer an AT&T offer.

Keywords

AT&T, data, plan, unlimited, iPhone

Pages
Publish Date & Author(s)

by Carl Howe, Director
4 pages
June 2010