What do you guys think of the new AT&T data plan pricing?

On the one hand, I'm thrilled to have a carrier be upfront about everything. As long as I never see the word "unlimited" applied to any of these plans, I'll be happy with their decision to be straightforward with their customers, both on what they get from the plans they pay for and what they can expect when they go over.

But on the other hand, I can't help but think that these plans hurt the heavy data user. I understand that people use less data than they think - we've talked about that before in regards to the iPad - but the fact remains that there are people who need more than 200MB of data (I'd burn through that in a couple days), and for those people these plans just seem a little worse.

I was a little shocked to see that they'd change the iPad pricing. I figured Apple had worked out a deal on that front, and I thought it was a fantastic deal. I was really impressed by that. I guess AT&T finally realized that it didn't make sense to give the iPad truly unlimited data when the iPhone didn't have it. I never understood that.

For me, the biggest offense here is that if someone is paying MORE for tethering, they don't get any more bandwidth. What that says is "yes, we give you these 2GB, but don't really use it, it's just there to make you feel good." Would it kill their business to give tethering plans another GB or two?

All I know is that I'm sitting pretty on T-Mobile with unofficial hotspot capability for no additional cost We'll see how long that lasts...

I'll also be curious to hear how tethering will [finally] work on the iPhone. Will it be traditional tethering or will they also have hotspot sharing?

What should be offensive is having to pay for tethering at all. You're paying for... Wait for it.... Nothing. Which is another way of saying what you've described, ATT doesn't actually want you to use 2GB or even 200MB when you're paying for those plans.

Tethering on the iPhone has been around and fully functional for almost a year. There might be something new in OS 4, but you don't have to wait to find out how tethering itself works, you can go read about it now. It uses either the USB dock connector or Bluetooth. I think it would be trivial for them to extend this to using WiFi and the reason it's not there already was probably to have something to release later or to appease carriers who don't want you setting up little private 3G networks.

Totally agree. $20 for something that AT&T has no control over anyway. It's like if the water utility told you that you have to pay them an additional $20 if you have automatic lawn sprinklers.

It's the whole culture of bundled services / value-added selling that bugs the living crap out of me. Not only am I paying for things I don't need, the sellers have this notion of still owning what I've purchased. I've said it before, but I want to buy a phone, and I want to purchase service. After that, leave me the hell alone. That's probably the main reason I bought my Nexus One. Too bad Google were too gutless to follow through.

I'm divided on it. To get the old 5GB ("unlimited") a month plan would cost $20 more ($50 total instead of $30). However, they are making it possible to lower peoples bills now. Before this, no matter what data cost $30 a month on 3G for the iPhone. Now, people can shrink that down to just $15 and be fine. I checked my iPhone statistics, going back to July of 08, and I've used an average of 245mb a month. My first month with the iPad when I was intentionally using certain things heavily, I still only hit 389mb. That will go down quite a bit, as WiFi at our new office is finally coming online in the next week or two.

It's also good to see AT&T being way more proactive in notifying users when they are approaching their monthly limit. Having warnings at 65%, 90% and 100% should help to avoid the surprise of overage.

I can partially see AT&Ts side on the tethering. Data usage on a phone, or even an iPad is going to be less then data usage on a laptop. My phone and iPad aren't constantly downloading OS X/Windows updates in the background (with sizes sometimes rivaling my monthly usage just to update iTunes). I'm not pulling down tons of flash, 720p Youtube videos and so on. So that part I understand. However, charging $20 extra is what I'll disagree with, especially since it doesn't even add any data. If I burn through my 2GB in a month, then start charging me overage.

As for what T-Mobile or others will do, it's hard to say, but the industry tends to follow each other closely. Charging for tethering is pretty standard unfortunately, and I doubt most carriers are pleased with Google tossing it into 2.2 without having each carrier enable it. It will be interesting to see what happens there.

I think you're missing the point. People complained that "unlimited" didn't really mean that the service was unlimited. Now they have a 2GB plan instead, but they clearly intend for you to not use that much data.

Yes, a desktop OS will likely consume more bandwidth. But there's still the 2GB cap. If you're still under 2GB after attaching your computer, why should they charge you more?

And the only possible answer is that they don't want you to actually consume the 2GB of bandwidth that you've paid for. Basically, you pay $25 for 2GB of bandwidth, and then you pay another $20 to actually use it.

I understand where they're coming from, though. They want to put a cap on the amount of data you're using. They don't want you to use your 3G connection as your home ISP. But they also want to avoid penalizing people who occasionally go over whatever their real maximum is.

The correct solution to this is probably something like: Set the cap at whatever their real limit is. Let's say 250MB. Then have a floating window of free overage quota, say 6GB over a year, 500MB a month. Each month you go over 250MB, that overage gets subtracted from your quota. After a year, you recover that used quota.

It sounds a little complicated, but it's actually easy to depict on a bill. Have a stacking bar graph that shows each of the last 12 months of overage, and mark the cap. (See below.)

The somewhat odd part is that when you go over, you have to buy more quota for that span of 12 months, so that you don't get double-charged. That is a little harder to depict.

I understand that people are suspicious of complex billing schemes, but something like this probably is the most fair for everyone.

Since they already have the infrastructure up where do they lose money if you use X bandwidth?

I might be missing the point (and I did say I disagree with the tethering charge), but another side of this that will be a big win for most people is cheeper data access. It goes from $30 a month down to $15 (plus whatever voice plan) now for minimum barrier to entry on a smartphone. Yes, AT&T (Sprint/Verizon/T-Mobile) would love everyone to just give them money and not use the service. What this move will likely mean is that AT&T will sign up even more people for data plans, and a large majority of them will never run into the overage charges even at the low 200MB entry point. So while they won't have people giving them money for nothing, they will have more people giving them some money for data.

And as far as penalizing people who go over, I find the new rules way better then the old ones. If you ran over the limit, you were billed very harsly. Now, you incur maybe an extra $10-$15, and have warnings before it happens.

A better solution that would be easily understandable to existing AT&T customers would be rollover data. With rollover (expiring after a year or so), you get the same benefit of allowing a few heavier usage months without penalty from time to time. And if you do get dinged the extra $10 a month once, then the unused part of that overage then is added into the pool, possibly eliminating the overage the next month. You get the same benefits as your plan, but without having to worry about planning for a bigger quota for a 12 month period.


They only have X number of radio spectrum slots and Y number of bits at each tower. If they continue to add new customers, they have to add more infrastructure. If people are capped at 200MB, or 2GB or some other number, it's easier to meet those demands compared to planning around unlimited use. An additional challenge comes in on the mobility side. Their infrastructure isn't mobile and only covers a small area with each tower. So to meet the demands of say me wanting to watch Netflix 24/7 on my iPad, they would need to beef up capacity at the tower near my home, near my work, and every tower around the areas I commonly hang out at. Time Warner by comparison only has to worry about improving the infrastructure at my house and any related upstream infrastructure.

Like Bitt said, I don't think that's the point. The point is that you are paying for 2GB of bandwidth for a month. It doesn't matter how you use that data connection, you paid for it. If they've done the math and concluded that the most bandwidth they can handle is 2GB, then they should do the opposite of what I suggested in my first post: make the "Data Pro" plan 1GB, and if you pay for tethering, you get 2GB.


Continuing from the idea that it shouldn't matter if you use all the data, it also shouldn't matter how quickly you use it. Everybody's billing periods don't all start on the same day each month, so usage is staggered. So again, it's a matter of AT&T not wanting you to use it. If it's a strain on their network to have all 2GB used, they should reflect that in their plans.


I never said I didn't like the idea of the 200MB plan. Just because I go over that in a month doesn't mean everyone will. I do think that we'll start using more and more data in the future, so we should worry about this (video chat, that cloud media syncing patent, etc), but for now a lot of people will benefit from the 200MB plan. I'm just concerned with AT&T's tethering prices and what they reflect.


Bitt, I like your idea, but I'm afraid that's probably a little more complicated than most users will be able to understand. Plus, the carrier would never make it as easy to understand as you have. They have a talent for obfuscating simple ideas.

I like what T-Mobile has proposed:

You get 5GB of bandwidth. If you go over, your connection is throttled.

That's it! It saves the network from bandwidth hogs, but it still lets you do all the most important things like email and light web browsing. And best of all I think all users could understand that.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I think the new AT&T plans are far more honest than the old one, and I think that the vast majority of people will see their data bill go down. I also agree that more people will be likely to sign up at $15 a month, which is great.

My complaint is solely with the tethering charge, and it belies their notion that you're really getting 2GB of bandwidth per month. I would be totally surprised if they didn't charge that tethering fee for any people who consistently use a large percentage of their bandwidth, regardless of whether they're tethering or not. After all, there's not really any way for them to determine whether there's any tethering going on or not.

This also ties into my complaint about the difficulty that exists in having your phone and your service being distinct from each other.

They oversubscribe their bandwidth. They potentially lose money in that their service sucks because it's always slow. Kinda like it is right now. Or they have to expand their infrastructure.

Yeah, I guess that is almost what I described, anyway, isn't it, except that in my scenario, some portion of your data doesn't rollover, and you start with virtual rollover data.

I use Veriaon wireless for my home ISP. I bump right up to my 5G limit every month.

I can't do any streaming at all.

A couple of interesting side notes to this:

- Someone said that the new data plans go into effect on something like the 7th, which is the same day that Steve Jobs will announce the iPhone 4g, which, with its faster connection speed, has the potential to use up even more data per minute. Not a coincidence, obviously.

- Supposedly, those who are already on the unlimited data plan can stay on it at the same price (i.e., they're upholding the contract we already signed). I'm guessing that if I wanted to buy the new telephone, doing so would nullify said contract and I would be subject to the new pricing scheme. Damn.

Nope, I'm wrong! Yay!

Decided to see what AT&T showed for my recent usage. Looks like I'll be fine on the 2GB a month plan with current usage. Hard to say how that would change with the new phone though.

Cell phone plans are way too complicated these things need to get unlimited already. I have been seeing unlimited plans offered so this seems like a step back. I also can't believe AT&T is still the only place in the USA you can get an iphone.

The problem is that none of the nominally unlimited plans are actually unlimited.

Jobs didn't directly address this at the recent D8 interview, but he did make some relevant comments. Apple really wants to just build one device and ship it anywhere in the world. They don't want to produce phone X for market Y, and phone Z for yet another market. AT&T is the only provider in the US who offers 3G GSM service on frequencies that align with what others use in the rest of the world. T-Mobile 3G uses a frequency setup noone else does, and Sprint/Verizon don't even use a compatible protocol (CDMA).

This will change down the road with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon all planning on LTE for 4G at some point, and Sprint hasn't taken the option off the table.

And I doubt Apple is holding to this as the only reason not to go to Verizon or the others. It's just a strong factor. Next week, we may all be talking about the newest iPhone being available on some other carrier. They did after all make one alternate revision for China, iPhones lacking WiFi.

I'm not trying to be contrary here, I just wasn't aware that there was even a rumor that the fourth generation iPhone would have any sort of faster connection. Even if it does, isn't AT&T still really far away from rolling out its 4G network? (by really far away I mean late 2011 to start)

I try to stick to "fourth-gen iPhone" because it's hard to say what they'll call it. If they call it the 4G, and it isn't on a 4G network, wouldn't that be a little disingenuous? And taking it one further, they couldn't release a phone next year and call it the 5G...

You have a good point. I assumed that since the phone was going to be named the "4G" that it could function on a "4G" network. But that's an interesting point of view: That the phone's name, and the network it operates on, could be two completely unrelated things.

I believe this was why Apple let the prototype get stolen. Seed the term "4G" with a couple of journalists, let the story multiply over the wires and, next thing you know, Apple's new phone is "4G".

I was getting tired of AT&T and my Treo so decided to try a 30-day experiment with a 4G phone on Friday, the Sprint HTC Evo. If I were traveling a lot I wouldn't pick this, but I tend to stay in their service area and don't take phones on vacations.

Wow, I got totally sucked in by that.

Public relations fail.

Wow what a dick !

Should I be sending cease and desists when I get unsolicited junk mail from AT&T ?

Now we know why AT&T is the way that it is.

Steve made it painfully obvious last night that he'd love to have the iPhone available on other carriers in the US. If there were other GSM/UMTS carriers with the same frequencies I'm sure the exclusivity agreement wouldn't have been as long and you guys would already have some choice.

Sorry, I forgot to ask you about this: since when? As far as I've heard, tethering still wasn't available. Are you talking about jailbroken phones? Because that doesn't count...

Of course, that means you can't get tethering.

He is perfectly correct, tethering has been available and working for a year. Just not in the US.

Ahh! That's right. I knew that.

Sorry, Bruno, but that's a weird argument to make. Aren't we talking about US AT&T cell phone plans? Yeah, it's great that other countries have tethering, but guess where it was promised a year ago and never delivered (and never even mentioned again)?