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March 20, 2013

AT&T Announces Expanded Data Plan Offerings to Help Companies Save on Data Costs

AT&T announced that it will start to provide larger, more affordable data plans, effective March 22. Many of these changes affect the company's popular Mobile Share plans.

The standard Mobile Share plans allow between one and 20 GB of data monthly. This can be expanded to plans with 30, 40 and 50 GB per month, priced at a rate of $10 per GB. At least one device using the data must be a smartphone and exceeding the data limit will cost $15 per GB.

Additional charges will apply for adding devices to the plan.

Other data plans are available from AT&T as well. A data-only plan with no text or voice service, Mobile Share - Data is offered at levels of 4 to 50 GB at a cost of $30 to $355 per month. Businesses sharing data for more than 25 devices can get 300MB to 10GB at a cost of $20 to $80 per month.

Customers can choose from existing data plans, or one of the new aforementioned plans, and can switch packages without triggering a contract extension.

Critics of these plans say they’re expensive for smartphone users. A 10GB data-only plan is $100/month but nearly doubles to $190/month when a smartphone is added and the plan changes to a voice-data format.

Relative to existing plans, it appears that AT&T customers can save on the new data-only plans that exclude smartphones, but is this enough to be compelling?

T-Mobile offers unlimited 4G data, voice and text for $70 per month on a no-annual-contract plan. While the T-Mobile plan does not offer mobile hotspots and is a phone plan that does not support tablets, it would still be less expensive to pursue a $100/10GB data-only plan from AT&T for non-smartphone devices – and use the T-Mobile plan for smartphones at a combined cost of $170 per month – than AT&T’s $190/month voice-data plan with a smartphone added on.

Anecdotal data from reader comments suggests data plans overseas are much less expensive. If these comments are true, American companies are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to mobile technology in a global economy.




Edited by Braden Becker


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