Seems like AT&T always has an ace up its sleeve when it comes to annoying iDevice customers. The latest victim being iPad users. The $29.99 truly unlimited monthly plan for iPad is no longer available to new customers; however, existing customers can choose to stay on the unlimited plan or opt for DataPro plan.
On the pretext of offering affordable mobile internet, AT&T has killed unlimited plans and now just provides two plans called DataPlus and DataPro ($15 per month for 200MB and $25 for 2GB respectively).
No unlimited plan for iPhone is understandable but for a device like iPad which is always data hungry, the removal of unlimited plan is completely unacceptable.
Here’s AT&T’s press release:
We’re definitely mourning the death of unlimited data — “unlimited” is a word that consumers always naturally like to hear — but AT&T points out that 98 percent of its smartphone subscribers use less than 2GB a month, which means that nearly all users ultimately stand to see a $5 reduction in their monthly bills. We spoke to Mark Collins — AT&T Mobility’s senior vice president of data and voice products — about the changes for a few clarifications on the company’s strategy, and he made it crystal clear that the concept of unlimited data is a thing in the past (echoing comments made recently by Verizon’s Lowell McAdam), particularly in light of the oncoming spectrum crunch that stands to make wireless broadband an even more precious commodity than it already is. He also mentioned that laptop plans are unaffected by this move, though he went on to say that they’ve laid a “framework” for data pricing here that should continue all the way through to the company’s LTE rollout, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see some tweaks made on the laptop side sooner or later (to reduce overage fees, if nothing else).
We mentioned that the change stands to hurt a few users, and it’s true — we’re extremely heavy smartphone users here, for example, and we’re hard-pressed to break even a gigabyte of usage in a month; anyone doing a boatload of video streaming though, or lacking access to WiFi at home and the office (AT&T’s quick to boast about its 20,000-odd hotspots) might find themselves regularly slamming headlong into that 2GB cap, and there won’t be any option but to buy overage. For what it’s worth, Collins pointed out to us that the plans will feature automatic text and email alerts at 65, 90, and 100 percent usage of your monthly allowance (and at 75 and 100 percent usage of each overage purchase), so it should be pretty easy to keep an eye on things and make sure you don’t break the bank.
