Andre Yoskowitz
6 Jun 2010 19:10
Last week, AT&T announced that they were dropping their $30 unlimited data plans for smartphones and netbook new users, while creating cheaper plans at the same time.
Existing subscribers can keep the unlimited plan but anyone signing up with the carrier after tonight cannot sign up for the $30 all-you-can-eat package.
The cheapest new plan is $15 per month, but will only include 200MB of data. If customers go over the limit, they will be charged $15 extra for every 200MB of data, a very expensive proposition.
A more reasonable plan is $25 per month and will give smartphone, tablet, netbook users 2GB of data for the month. For every 1GB over the cap they go, they will be charged $10, another expensive proposition.
The carrier says, however, that 65 percent of smartphone owners use less than 200MB of data per month, and 98 percent use less than 2GB. For the most part, the only people who need unlimited are iPhone users, a significant number of which will surpass 2GB monthly.
It should be interesting to see the horror stories coming from iPad and iPhone users when they have to pay over $50 per month for bandwidth.