AT&T Introduces Awful New "Unlimited" Prepaid Phone Plan

Megalith

Megalith

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Only a sucker would pay $60 a month for an “unlimited” plan that is capped at 3Mbps, right? Well, either there are a lot of them out there or AT&T is nuttier than we thought, since their new GoPhone plan is just that. As the article points out, it is hard to imagine why anyone would want this plan when Cricket’s unlimited option exists, which grants you 8Mbps for LTE and 4Mbps for 4G, with a 22GB cap.

…GoPhone Unlimited customers get unlimited talk, text, and data. But that data is capped at a max speed of 3Mbps, which is less than half the speed of AT&T’s average LTE speed of 7.93Mbps. That speed is cut even more if you want to watch a video. Videos are not only limited to a 480p resolution, but will also max out download speeds at 1.5Mbps. Even the “unlimited” banner is a bit of a misnomer since AT&T will temporarily slow your already slow data during high traffic times if you go over 22GB of usage for the month. You also won’t be able to tether another device to your phone.
 
Once again..Deceptive Advertising. Sadly we have people even on this forum that defend this despicable shit. You look at the actual plan and it doesn't mention anywhere obvious about the data throttling. Nope, just says "Unlimited data", when it is in fact very much limited. For the record I am talking about the data cap and video quality cap, not the actual speed.
 
It's a step in the right direction, but no where near big enough. Their old 60$ a month plan only gave 5gbs of data then 2g speeds, but it's not nearly what cricket offers which is owned by At&t, so the real question is what gives?
 
Yeah notice this in a commercial, luckily with the DVR, I rewound and paused and was like... Whaaaa? 3Mbps speeds? So AT&T is pushing a cellular version of DSL?
 
AT&T is pretty despicable. Unfortunately, they're literally the only provider in one of the areas my family lives in (many of us share a plan to keep costs down). I think the best experience we've ever had with them is earning a decent increase in our data cap after complaining about a huge surprise charge on our bill.
 
I don't use much data, got 3 lines on 3GB and roll most of it over every month. Don't really have issues with ATT. Unlimited woulda been nice but yea it was too much of an increase for 3 lines.
 
They're getting closer. Instantaneous bandwidth usage should be how this should be managed. If 3Mbps w/ no cap was offered, I'd think that'd be a fair product. The whole aspect that made internet access comfortable was to just use the product (internet access) and not have to think about your usage. Dial-up and early broadband deployment times were really the most free/liberating in this regard. Funny enough, they're also the times to credit for giving us "unlimited" as a marketing term.
 
azuza001 said:
It's a step in the right direction, but no where near big enough. Their old 60$ a month plan only gave 5gbs of data then 2g speeds, but it's not nearly what cricket offers which is owned by At&t, so the real question is what gives?
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Not so savvy people see Cricket, assume it is a small no name carrier, and go to ATT because the ATT brand has the big name halo. These people are very unlikely to move to other carriers, i.e. T-mobile. The savvy people see Cricket, sees that it operates on ATT and is owned by ATT, and goes to Cricket. These people are very likely to switch carriers. Either way, ATT keeps the customers, and makes more money off of the suckers that don't know how to research options.
 
Must be nice for anything unlimited. Here in Canada I pay over 100 a month for cell coverage and only get 1GB data.
 
And this is why I have just a cheap flip Tracfone. I do all my browsing an such on my laptop or desktop or the occasional tablet. Only cost me 100 bucks A YEAR!!
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It's even cheaper than that if you renew online. I mean I renewed in January and was offered additional years @ $45 / year after paying for the first year so I got 2 years of service for less than $160. I believe I could have added more years but that is too far in the future for me to prepay..
 
It's things like this that makes me skeptical of companies. Anytime I hear someone talk near 0 regulation free-market (or anything that resembles "companies look out for their customer" these are the things I think about but in but multiplied x1000.

These continued shenanigans really need to just end. Service capabilities and limitations just need to be clearly labeled and not just in a sea of small print.
 
If you read through the article, the regular go customers get 6gb of real data now per month, when it used to be 5. So a gig bump.

I've hit 5 before, and then they throttle you down your phone is effectively useless. I don't know where the 128k number comes from, but it's more like 14.4k. You can't even send an email, it just fails.

For the price though, you can get yearly cards from straight talk during holiday season and it drops the monthly price to 38 bucks / month. Good enough for me.
 
High speed of Cricket's plan may be capped. I read that was the way on some of the MVNO AT&T providers like Straighttalk. Either way, yes this is a crappy deal.

$30 for 5GB of LTE on T-Mobile Prepaid best out there. Just have to put up with a 100M talk cap, but who walks on the phone much anyway? Can add to it for $0.10 a minute and it's probably still cheaper.
 
Looking at my last month's data usage (not with AT&T mind you) my phone is at 381 MB... so yeah, sorry guys I'm one of those who bring down the average when they talk "top 3% of users" when calculating how much data to give you :D
 
sleepeeg3 said:
High speed of Cricket's plan may be capped. I read that was the way on some of the MVNO AT&T providers like Straighttalk. Either way, yes this is a crappy deal.

$30 for 5GB of LTE on T-Mobile Prepaid best out there. Just have to put up with a 100M talk cap, but who walks on the phone much anyway? Can add to it for $0.10 a minute and it's probably still cheaper.
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My family is on Cricket. $100 flat (includes taxes and fees) for 5 lines, 3 GB of high speed (8 mbps), unlimited everything else. I have found the low speed (128 kbps) to be just barely acceptable for browsing [H]forum ;)
 
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