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AT&T Is Boosting Data Plans, Dropping Overage Fees (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: ATT Inc, the No. 2 U.S wireless provider, said on Wednesday that it would roll out a new data plan that does away with overage fees and reduces data speeds for wireless customers who surpass their data allowance. Beginning Sunday, customers can choose the new Mobile Share Advantage plan and pay for extra data, if needed, or work with slower data speeds instead of paying for overages, the company said in a statement. Its current plan includes a $5 data overage charge per 300 megabytes on its 300-megabyte plan and $15 per 1 gigabyte on other plans. ATT has also revised prices and data bucket sizes. For instance, its larger 25-gigabyte plan now costs $190 per month for four smartphone lines. It previously cost $235. All the new plans include an access charge of $10 to $40 per month for each device, ATT said. The new plans will continue to have features such as unlimited text and talk and rollover data. Plans above 10 gigabytes also include unlimited talk and text to Mexico and Canada and no roaming charges in Mexico. Last month, Verizon introduced a new "Safety Mode" for its data plans that similarly throttles customers who exceed their monthly allotment to avoid overages. While Verizon charges customers on lower tier plans for the feature, ATT notes that it does not apply any extra charges.
Not quite, and what's going on here is actually pretty insidious.
Verizon has attempted to launch their own streaming video service called go90. They want to be a competitor to other streaming video services. They also want to force everyone onto metered data plans that charge very expensive overages. However, go90 is zero rated. There's also what's called FreeBee data, in which businesses can pay for their content to be zero rated.
One of these is a pretty clear antitrust violation. Verizon is using their position as a carrier to gain an advantage with go90 over other streaming video services. The other is very close to paid prioritization.
Whether content is zero rated or not doesn't change the actual amount of bandwidth consumed. Watching 100 GB of Netflix uses the same amount of wireless bandwidth as 100 GB of go90. If network congestion was really as severe as it's made out to be, carriers couldn't afford to zero rate any content that is a large amount of data.
they are dropping the data charges but raising the access charge per line by $5. on my 6 line account it would mean $20 less for data but $30 more for access charges which would be a price increase