Personally, I'm locally waiting for Cablevision (here in NY) to enter the wireless markets. I think it's absurd that VZ and T require these 2 years plans, and charge a mandatory $ 30 for Internet access. These dogs will die a slow death, IMO. No one wants contracts or mandatory packages to have a Blackberry. As far as this news story is concerned, my guess is that their networks have hit a saturation level, so that is driving this decision, moreso than economics, and attempting to stimulate "lower-end" sales.
This news is significant, ATT is going to lose many, many, many, customers over this new plan. This isn't 1998 or 2002, its 2010 and these kind of services should be unlimited for a set fee. How many more nickels and dimes do these companies need. I can bet in the next few years or so this will be an entirely different market, companies are already offering no contract and unlimited everything for $50-$60 a month. I had tmobile way back when and the reason why was because of the unlimited data plan they offered at a time when all other carriers were charging per MB or KB. If VZ is smart they will get ready to come out with a plan that would put ATT to shame and that in itself would send MILLIONS and MILLIONS of ATT customers straight to verizon, but it looks like they too are moving to a metered billing plan. I use ATT and my contract is almost up, reading this news sounds like Im not grandfathered in to my original contract. I am just wondering if I don't resign another 2 year agreement if I will be able to hold my unlimited plan for $30. From the article: Existing iPhone customers, meanwhile, would be allowed to keep their unlimited data plans, at least until their existing contracts run out. AT&T would almost certainly face class-action suits if it tried to change the terms of existing contracts, lawyers say.
Interesting: AT&T said 98% of its customers use less than 2 gigabytes a month. So if 98%%%%%%%%%%%%%% of its customers use less than 2 GIGS per month than why are they crying about network issues and changing plans to "benefit" the customer??? It all comes down to $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Both Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile (no contract, pay-as-you-go divisions of Sprint) now offer unlimited Blackberry service w/o a contract all for around $60/month with data. Only drawback is no MS Exchange service.
Research In Motion may benefit from new AT&T rate plans Analysts note that BlackBerry generates less traffic than iPhone for data Tavis McCourt of Morgan Keegan said that BlackBerry devices can send five times the number of e-mails as other smart phones using the same bandwidth, and browse three times the number of web sites "due to RIM's proprietary compression algorithms and back-end network architecture." http://www.marketwatch.com/story/blackberry-may-benefit-from-new-att-rate-plans-2010-06-02
"DataPro customers that exceed the monthly cap would be charged $10 for each additional gigabyte of data." "DataPlus customers that exceed their limit would be charged an additional $15 for another 200 megabytes." ---------------------------------- They think $10 to $75 per GB is fair? Not 1 cent or ten cents per GB, but $75. Dial-up is about a dollar per GB.
If you don't have a text messaging plan and you send/receive 1 GB worth of texts (average size texts), you'd get billed $1,310,720.00. AT&T's Text Messages Cost $1,310 per Megabyte: http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/01/atts-text-messages-cost-1310-per-megabyte/