In a perfect world, we'd one day all be guzzling from an endless font of virtually free bandwidth, streaming 1080p video straight to our WXGA handsets with stereo Bluetooth beamed straight to implants in our ear canals. Turning our attention back to reality for a moment, though, and the situation is a little more bleak: carriers are plagued with crappy, overloaded networks, backhaul issues, and a 4G rollout that could easily span a decade. To that end, caps are still firmly in place on US carriers' so-called "unlimited" laptop data plans, and overage rates make the occasional slip-up nasty enough to bankrupt you if you're not offered clemency from customer service. The good news is that
AT&T's data overage rates have dropped significantly as of November 6, going from 49 cents per megabyte to 5 cents on the $60 5GB plan and 10 cents on the (nearly useless) $40 200MB plan. That still means you're paying over $50 for each gigabyte of overage -- but as AT&T points out, it's a hell of a lot better than the $500 you were paying before.
[Thanks, Kal]
posted Nov 12th 2009 5:18PM
@ Chris Ziegler
Does this apply to those of us that are already in contract? Or is this just for new people singing up? Thanks!
Yep, you'll automatically get the new rate.
They couldn't even keep the internet working on my iphone, now they think they gonna have it working for a laptop.
The $40 plan keeps the same rate, just charges you a bit better about going over by a little.
Wow every time i see these articles on prices i can't get over why there's this perception that american cell phone carriers are so much better or cheaper than canadian ones.
Up here overage has been 3c/min for probably the last year or so, and there's usually a $100 cap no matter how many GB you use. And we don't even have plans that go as low as 200MB, they start at 500MB for $25 canadian (which is probably less than $20 american).
Then on top of that throw in the fact that all big three companies up here have 21Mbps coverage that reaches almost the entire population and i really don't see any reason to envy the american carriers, eh?
But you see, there's a problem with that reasoning. You'd have to live in Canada.
I'm just not sure I could make that sacrifice.