AT&T has decided to follow Verizon’s policy to offer a single plan across a platter of devices. Being the second major U.S carrier, AT&T has decided that Verizon’s “Share Everything” plans will be beneficial to both the company as well as its customers. The plans don’t seem different from Verizon’s even on the pricing aspect. AT&T will begin offering these plans from August this year.
These plans offer unlimited minutes for phone calls and unlimited number of texts. A maximum of 10 devices are allowed under this plan and one of the ten is required to be a smartphone. For each device that customers tie into the Mobile share plans, the customer will have to pay a monthly fee for the shared data. AT&T has adopted a marketing strategy which ensures that the larger the data plan, the less individual components cost. If a customer decides to adopt the base configuration, he’d have to pay $45 per smartphone which would be tied to 1GB of data at a fee of $40 per month. A 20 GB shared bucket would enable a customer to pay $30 per smartphone tied to a $200 monthly plan. The fee for non-smartphone devices is gadget dependant. A non-smartphone handset would require you to pay $30 per non-smartphone handset. This charge reduces $20 per laptop and $10 for a tablet or a gaming console like the PSP. In addition to this, AT&T would charge an additional $15 fee for every extra GB of data used under this plan.
Does this imply that customers will have to pay less to surf the internet? In some cases it might apply, but in most cases it doesn’t. This can be explained through a simple example. Assume that a customer currently opts for an AT&T plan that costs $40 a month (offers 450 minutes of talk time), an additional $20 for unlimited text messages and finally a data plan for the smartphone and tablet, which will cost $60 for 6 GB. This would bring the total to $120 a month (excluding taxes). Compare this with a shared data plan, 6GB of shared data between a tablet and a smartphone would cost $135 which is $15 more than the previous plan which would have two separate company contracts. However if you can bring in more devices into a group, the benefits are many. The new plan would offer better economy as the number of minutes are unlimited and there is extra fee for turning your smartphone into a Wi-Fi hotspot
Shared data plans are clearly the future of telecommunications industry especially after the evolution of cloud computing. This policy would also increase the sales of 3G and 4G tablets in comparison to the traditional Wi-Fi only tablets. Firms have indicated that there wouldn’t be a drastic change in case you change to the shared data plans.
