On Wednesday, AT&T announced new Mobile Share Advantage plans that won’t charge you extra for going over your data limit, instead slowing down your data for the remainder of your billing month.
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AT&T is likely betting consumers will switch to get rid of annoying charges when they go over the limits.
We’re not done with the surprises – while existing T-Mobile customers can keep their current plans, it sounds like T-Mobile will replace their Simple Choice Plans with T-Mobile One once the plan becomes available on September 6. Despite the claims of simplicity, ONE has a lot of variables and additional charges.
This certainly caused for a bit of commotion, and Sprint was right on the heels of T-Mobile to counter with a similar plan of their own – Unlimited Freedom. Those moves have worked. Unlimited Freedom the same price as T-Mobile One for a family of four, but it’s less front-loaded – the first line is $60, the second is $40, and subsequent lines are $30 each.
“The wireless industry is extremely competitive.We are always watching the competition to try and take something that appears popular and make it even better”. With those speeds, users can check email or do light browsing on the web, but video watching and other data hungry tasks will be painfully slow. The companies’ plans are not just competitive, but also charge less than $95 a month for unlimited data. These changes are part of AT&T’s reformed Mobile Shared Advantage plans and will roll out on August 21. AT&T will still send text messages to alert users when they are at 75%, 90% and 100% of their monthly data bucket (or at 90% and 100% for businesses). The smallest and cheapest 300MB and 2GB plans ($20 and $30 per month, respectively) will be going away. “The new plans cost significantly less than the $95 a month each company now charges for unlimited data”. T-Mobile and Sprint lower the quality of all video streamed on their networks for customers of the unlimited plans.
People will no longer need to hold back on using data on smartphones, but those who haven’t been using that much data could wind up paying more for unlimited data they don’t need.
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Thus, there’s no HD video upsell as there is on T-Mobile. Translation: Not everyone should switch to the new plans come Sunday. Also, the cost per megabyte has been lowered for large data packages like the 30GB, previously offered at $225 and now provided for $135. The reason is that a standard definition consumes about five times less data network capacity than a video in high-definition, saidRecon AnalyticsanalystRoger Entner. After that the second line is $50, with later lines landing at $20 a piece up to 8 lines. You can add tablets for $20 per month each. You have to pay extra for those. The pricing and perks were fairly alike, leaving nearly no question that Sprint’s move was in direct response to T-Mobile’s introduction of their new abolishing of tiered data plans.
