AT&T Quietly Removes Unlimited Data Plans
Posted by Kevin McGuire on Wednesday, June 2, 2010 · 
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In a press release today, AT&T announced two new data plans for it’s wireless service. The DataPlus plan offers 200M of throughput for $15 ($15/200M if exceeded), and DataPro offers 2G of throughput for $25 ($10/1G if exceeded). Also available is a tethering option, which will allow a subscriber to access the internet on a laptop via their iPhone. But with tethering, the bandwidth will still be limited.
AT&T keeps a positive spin on the press release by suggesting that the entry level voice and data bundle is now $15 cheaper than before. What isn’t in the press release? Any mention of an unlimited data plan. In fact, they subtly add towards the end, “For new iPad customers, the $25 per month 2 GB plan will replace the existing $29.99 unlimited plan.” My read is that this is the case for all customers. Existing customers will be grandfathered in (and can switch if they want), but say goodbye to unlimited data. So why are the switching to the capped model? In the press release they state that 98% of customers use less than 2G of data. So how much data is the remaining 2% consuming? A lot. At an investor conference late last year, Ralph de la Vega, AT&T’s head of wireless suggested that 3% of their customers were consuming 40% of the network capacity. No wonder AT&T has been in such hot water over sluggish network performance.
One other interesting point of the press release. AT&T seems to be going out of their way to help customers keep track of data usage. AT&T will send text messages when the customer hits certain thresholds, as well as allow them to call *DATA# from their phone to get their statistics. How nice of them, especially since the FCC will likely require this in the future.
It will be interesting to see if other companies follow. As of this posting, Verizon still had an unlimited data plan available on their website. I’m thinking with the success of Android, VZW won’t be too far behind.
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