AT&T introducing new data plans: DataPlus and DataPro

AT&T has decided that unlimited data is no longer something that they want to offer to new customers, and on June 7th, it goes away for good. Now, if you area already on the $30 per month unlimited data plan, you are certainly able to keep it, provided you never move away from it. Once you change your data plan, you can never go back to unlimited. How’s that for a means to lock in current iPhone customers? Continue on for a detailed look at the new AT&T data rate plans.

In place of the old data plans, AT&T has two new plans that they hope will meet the needs of everyone out there—basically, you will be paying more for less (or less for less, depending on how you look at it):

• DataPlus: With DataPlus, you pay $15 per month for 200MB of data. If you run out, you just pay another $15 for each addition 200MB of data that you use. In other words, if you choose DataPlus, then going above 200MB one time in a month will cost you $30—the same that the unlimited plan costs today.
• DataPro: With the DataPro plan, you pay $25 per month for 2GB of data. If you go over, then you pay $10 for each additional gigabyte of data usage. Now, in this scenario, we think this will cover a very large portion of people out there…but still, $30 for unlimited, worry-free data is still a better deal.

Now, one cool thing that AT&T is doing that we wanna give them props for, is that they are allowing you to switch between the two plans above pretty much at will, with no change to your contract status. So if you are on DataPlus and you went way over, you could switch to DataPro and have it retroactively start at the beginning of your billing cycle. Definitely an uncharacteristic (but welcome) move.

So, what about tethering? Well, AT&T has jacked that up as well. In a nutshell, you no longer can get that 5GB per month tethering plan. Instead, you sign up for the DataPro plan, and then pay an additional $20 per month tethering fee. Thing is, that tethering fee doesn’t do anything but allow you to tether your device. You have to use your same 2GB of data that you pay for with DataPro. That is asinine on so many levels.