AT&T Introducing Verizon-Style Shared Data Plans 307
zacharye writes with news of some exciting rate changes for folks on ATTWS. From the article: "AT&T on Wednesday announced the upcoming availability of new shared data plans. Following Verizon's lead, AT&T's new plans will allow subscribers to share data between family members and also between devices. Dubbed 'AT&T Mobile Share' plans, the new offerings start at $40 per month plus $45 per device for unlimited voice minutes and messaging and 1GB of data, and top out at $200 plus $30 per device for unlimited voice and texts plus 200GB of data..."
My favorite part is where you pay per-device and get nothing in return.
Saves nothing, really. (Score:3, Informative)
In my case, 4 friends and myself all have smartphones together on my plan. Since nobody really talks on their phones much (what is this, 1992?) we share a 700 minute plan, and have something like 4,500 rollover minutes. But we do use a good bit of data and billions of texts are sent every month. (3 women.)
So I did some quick calculation: $90 a month for the 6GB plan with all the unlimited texting and etc. 5 smartphones at $35 a piece, yielding monthly total of $265 before taxes. Right now, our bill is $280 after taxes. That's $56 a month per person. Not so bad. The new plans would put us at $53 per person. /shrug. So we gain unlimited talk time we don't use, save $3 per person a month. Not terribly motivating.
Re:Sad, but we let them do this. (Score:5, Informative)
so go prepaid. you can get "unlimited" data for $30 a month if you're willing to buy your own phone. and with the iphone about to have its 6th generation released there isn't much different every year so it's not like you have to run out and buy a new phone every year to keep up with specs
most games will play on 2-3 year old phones
email, evernote and facebook don't need dual core
in fact 99% of what the phone does is OK on a single core. i could play MP3's 15 years ago on mobile CPU's so it's not like you need multiple cores to read email and listen to music.
don't listen to the idiots at anandtech who keep dreaming that you need the latest and greatest to do simple things and you will have money. these were the same idiots who were telling people 10 years ago that you needed a $300 graphics card just to run the Windows GUI "fast"
I'm glad I switch carriers (Score:5, Informative)
For individual users this "bucket" plan is similar to the old plan. But seriously, this stuff is getting expensive with the big carriers. I switched from ATT to verizon years ago because I hated getting dropped calls. Never happened again in Verizon. Then I got their unlimited data and a smart phone. It was awesome and fast. Then they started capping their data and I upgraded the phone which did not grandfather me into their unlimited data plan. That's when things started to down hill... very fast.
That's when I realized I was paying way too much. I was paying $80/month for 2gig data, 350minutes and 500 txt message limit. I could pay over $100 for unlimited texting alone but everything else the same.
It was getting ridiculous and 3G was just getting slower for me because verizon would cap your speed if you went over 200mb!!! They said it was to help with people from going over the 2gig limit and to get the full speed again you have to go through a month where your data usage was less than 200mb... which basically meant you had to not use your phone at all for a month and still pay for it...
So, I switched to Virgin Mobile.
Yes, I paid $300 for my HTC Evo V 4g 3D phone, but the fact that it comes with no contract and a minimum $35/month bill for 350 minutes and unlimited texting and data* *they cap the speed if you go over 2.5gigs but once you pay that $35 phone card the limit is reseted. If you plan on having the phone for 2 years, that totals to $12.5 a month for paying the phone, which makes $35 + $12.5 = $47.5, which is still far cheaper than any plan out there from ATT, Sprint or Verizon (and TMobile). Plus you can buy the prepaid cards and not pay tax on them, so that's a true, flat $35/month payment.
Re:Sad, but we let them do this. (Score:3, Informative)
don't listen to the idiots at anandtech who keep dreaming that you need the latest and greatest to do simple things and you will have money. these were the same idiots who were telling people 10 years ago that you needed a $300 graphics card just to run the Windows GUI "fast"
You'll have to point me to this article on Anandtech that states everyone must go out and purchase the latest and greatest. Until you do so, I'm just going to presume the only idiot here is you for trashing a site that specializes in reviewing new equipment!
Re:Sharing? (Score:5, Informative)
Nearly no one wants an unlimited call/txt plan. 100 of each would be more than enough for me.
You are forgetting young people (teenagers, mostly). Each of my nephews and my younger sister can go through a 20-30 texts per day without trying hard.
Re:Sharing? (Score:5, Informative)
$40/mo bill for services + $45/mo premium for phone ownership = $85/mo (for a single device)
This is to the exclusion of all the excise fees, taxes, and other miscellaneous bullshit telcos charge customers; I foresee a single device costing well over $100/mo on this new plan.
This plan isn't for someone with a single phone. Nowhere has anyone said they're eliminating Individual plans, or existing family talk plans. This is for large groups, with a diverse set of devices.
If you have a single phone, stick with your Individual plan. If you have 2-3 people, stick with a Family Talk plan.
Re:Oy (Score:5, Informative)
It is the density of towers... but It's not just the towers. AT&T and Verizon both have 850MHz for voice and data, and 700MHz for 4G, which propagate better, not to mention not getting so attenuated by buildings, forests, etc. (AT&T does need 1900MHz for one direction on their 3G connection). Sprint and T-Mo have only the 1900MHz channel for voice and Sprint's 3G. Sprint put WiMax at 2500MHz, which is worse yet... T-Mo's 3G is at 1700MHz and 2100MHz, so less robust. Sprint's putting their LTE at 800MHz, on the old Nextel frequency, so things may eventually get better with them... but that's a couple of years off, I suspect. And data only right now.
AT&T has also had a tower problem in some areas. When Cingular bought AT&T's mobile phone division, they nixed the old DAMPS system and put the whole company on GSM. But DAMPS had better range per cell. So in some areas, you have coverage that's spottier than it was intended to be, simply because of this (I'm sure they filled in extra cells in cities to deal with this, but it's still an issue in rural areas... one of the reasons AT&T drops more calls, the other being issues with the way GSM 2G does cell handoffs).