AT&T Announces New Family Plans and Prices to Try and Fight Off T-Mobile

[dgstorm]

[video=youtube;AANCZBuOm8I]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AANCZBuOm8I[/video]​

AT&T keeps shifting gears on us. They apparently want to stem the bleeding caused by T-Mobile's aggressive marketing onslaught. This time AT&T has announced some new family plans. These new plans offer decent pricing for folks who port their numbers over from Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon. AT&T's new plan basically gives users unlimited talk and text, while the entire family shares a pool of 10GB of data. The price starts at $130 for two lines and then adds $15 per additional line, thus 3 lines would be $145, and 4 lines is $160, etc.

AT&T is claiming families can save between $40 to $100 over a regular individual plan with them. Comparably, new customers form Verizon will supposedly save $100 dollars with comparable plans. We won't exactly vouch for their numbers, but we can report them! To get all the details and make those comparisons yourself, head on down to the source link below for the full press release. You can also check out the video above for more info.

Source: AT&T

 

[johnomaz]

AT&T patents a system to limit high-bandwidth users | TweakTown There are better pages out there, but you get the point. I don't plan on ever going back to AT&T or Verizon because of crap like this.

 

[Sydman]

If they combined that with T-Mobile's paying to get you out of contract, I would be gone. Not sure I can yet justify paying ETF on 3 lines to jump ship.

 

[Sydman]

AT&T patents a system to limit high-bandwidth users | TweakTown There are better pages out there, but you get the point. I don't plan on ever going back to AT&T or Verizon because of crap like this.

Can't really blame them, that is just the way business is. I would more be upset with the ones that voted to kill off Net Neutrality, that was keeping stuff like this at bay.

 

[kodiak799]

AT&T patents a system to limit high-bandwidth users | TweakTown There are better pages out there, but you get the point. I don't plan on ever going back to AT&T or Verizon because of crap like this.

This is not necessarily a bad thing for users, it depends on how AT&T implements it. It's potentially a way to further offer different tiers of data (which could mean lower costs for some, or at least more options for pricing relative to use). For example, they could potentially offer two tiers of unlimited data, one with persistent/sustained high bandwidth such as Netflix and torrents, and another which is more "bursts" of bandwidth such as basic surfing and short youtube videos.

But it could also be an example of "metering", which is a concept I don't like because in terms load/network congestion a news app that downloads stories is not equivalent to Netflix just because it consumes the same amount of data (over a month) as a 2-hr movie.