AT&T to limit unlimited data plans to 5GB a month?
By Will Park on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 1:12 PM PST In AT&T, Rumors, Services
The wireless market in the US is one big game of copy-cat. When one or two of the big-dogs in the US market make a serious move to maximize their revenue, you can be sure that the other players will be making similar changes. With other carriers already limiting their “unlimited” data packages, we can see why AT&T (NYSE: T) would follow suit – not that it’s right, but it’s not entirely unexpected.
The agent/employee discussion forum at HowardForums has revealed the possibility of new data plans for AT&T. The new unlimited data plans are said to include a 5GB “soft” cap in order to discourage excessive use – “users will not be billed overages but people with constant overages will be contacted to try to reassess the users needs.”
Unlimited PDA data plans will be lowered to $30, with unlimited MediaNET access going for just $15 per month. However, text messages will no longer be bundled with data plans. An extra $5 gets you 200 SMS text messages per month, $15 gets you 1,500 text messages, $20 gets you unlimited individual texts, and $30 gives your family plan unlimited text messaging.
[Via: HoFo]
They still won’t have a text plan that falls in bewteeen 200 and 1500 texts…I can’t believe they will stil force people to get a plan that has too few or too many texts -
4 newtype2011
I think that you are absolutely right.
AT&T policy is strange for me
If it’s not unlimited, they shouldn’t be allowed to advertise it as such. It’s false advertising. I see a lawsuit coming along.
I seen the commerical over and over about people with the family plans would get unlimited texts messaging and when i called about it they said it was a mistake by there advertising dept..And they would not give it to me I don’t think they should get away with making a mistake like that that is more like false advertising..
and also now there bundle packages we were paying for they r doing away with that so we have to pay seperate for text and internet.. I think if we want since they falsly advertised this stuff that we should be able to get out of our contracts without a fee…They should be sued for false advertising..
lol uh how much does it cost to text from the U.S.A. to Italy?
If it’s not unlimited, they shouldn’t be allowed to advertise it as such. It’s false advertising. I see a lawsuit coming along.
there really isn’t any need for a message plan between 200 and 1500. the 200 is $5 with 10cents a message in excess of that. so if u do the math, u’ll realize that 300 messages will cost ya $15 a month, the same as the 1500 a month plan, so if u use between 300-1500 messages, go for the $15 level. $5 is good for 25 pay as you go, so if u use more than 25 messages and less than 300, get the $5 plan, 300-1600, get the $15 plan and anything above that, go unlimited
The main reason for these changes is because there are a very few minority (when I saw few I’m talking about 100 people, thats it) That use over 75% of the carriers bandwith because they run companies on a single aircard, no lie. These VERY few individuals are costing the carriers MILLIONS of dollars a month. So inorder to stop these serious loss, they limited their plans down to 5 Gigs a Month to get rid of these individuals.
So try not to blame the Carrier for switching their rate plans to limited becasue chances are, you wont come close to using 5 Gigs by urself in a month. Not unless you are an illegal file sharer, major porn addict, or your social life consists of your ability to be connected to the net 24/7. And if any of those are the case, maybe you should rethink your lives!
@iphoneuser
your logic makes no sense.
@ $5 for 200 messages, each message costs me a discounted 2.5 cents each. Yes, 10 cents each after, but that’s why we buy the packages, for the discount.
Now, when you buy more in a package, the cost increases, but the price per decreases. That’s why if you buy the 1500 package, the price per drops to a penny each.
So for a middle plan of 700 text’s at the cost of $10 a month, the discount would drop from 2.5 cents each to about 1.4 cents each. And people would save $60 a year that they might not want to waste on 100’s of unused text’s each month.
It’s just basic math. All of us in the middle either have to pay more for going over or pay more for not having to worry about it. And that’s exactly where they want us.
Don’t get me started on minutes, My wife and I never use all of our 1400 but we’re always over 700 so we’re forced to pay $20 more each month instead of another incremental step of $10 for 1000 minutes or so. So in a perfect world I could pay $10 less a month on minutes and $5 more a month on text’s and not feel so screwed over by AT&T…
And another thing!
I have family minutes, why not share family texts?
Yes, there is a family text plan. But it’s unlimited and $30, which is ridiculous for my wife and I. But we could easily share a 700 or 1500 text plan if offered. But instead they make us each have individual text plans while sharing our minutes. Ridiculous!
So even if I ponied up the $15 for the 1500 text’s, I still can’t text my wife because each text to and from her would cost us collectively 4 text’s (to and from) for only 2 actual messages! So now I have to bump my wife’s plan up so we might as well go to the family unlimited plan at $30 more a month when in actual together we might only use 500-700 text’s total together with unchecked normal usage.
Alright, now I’m done. (unless you get me started on data packages…)
@Raidium
Nice Telecom propaganda you have there. Too bad one air card can’t accommodate even the needs of an average small company. And even if downstream/upstream was peaked 24/7, 100 cards could not tie up 75% of the bandwidth for a network like you said (granted it would be about 25 Tbits if peaked 24/7, but that really shouldn’t tie up a netwo).
I don’t understand how At&t is allowed to do this.
It is like advertising free refills and then limiting it to 2 refills in the contract.
How is this legal…it must be if they are doing it?
To the person who says arriving at 5 gigs of data is out of reach it is time to get real. There are multitude of things that could easily reach 5 gigs of data in a months time and many even within a few hours. I download and install open source code a lot as well as use streaming video and audio, all of which contribute to gigabytes of data and are perfectly legal, sane and useful. If I am paying a healthy price for an internet connection and the $76 per month fee, which is the current AT&T ‘unlimited’ data plan in question here, for connecting my laptop to a BROADBAND network then I EXPECT to be able to USE the dang thing. I can reach 5 gigs in a days time EASILY and often do. I used to do this on dial-up and paid a measly $7 a month and only quit because of the turtle like slow speeds, but this marks a full $70 PER MONTH MORE of my hard earned money that I am spending with the full understanding that it will buy SERVICE, not LIMITATIONS! If AT&T insists on ‘capping’ things then the only REAL solution is to DECREASE the charge for the inferior service. All the arguments about bandwidth, p2p, network strangulation etc, are moot points. The bottom line is service and the charges therof. AT&T should leave politics out of it and return to fair business practices.
The 5gig thing to the unlimited plan is retarded. When at&t decided to offer the unlimited data plan, they should had told us about the 5gig limit so we wouldn’t have chose to pay the ridiculous additional $30 a month. It’s just like buying a car and instead of the seller selling it “as it is” they sell it as in “perfect condition” even though the engine is mess up. It’s like they are not giving us the full fact. All I am saying is that it’s hard to trust a company that hides things like those to the loyal customers. Well, at the end I guess it’s legal to deceive customers. A message to all companies like at&t, “There are people who are excited about the 3g unlimited data plan and is willingly pay for it, so I just hope that you guys don’t destroy that excitement by limiting the unlimited data plan”