AT&T Brings Back Unlimited Mobile Data To Lure TV Subscribers (bloomberg.com) 68
An anonymous reader writes: Five years after AT&T discontinued its unlimited mobile data plan, the company is bringing it back with a catch: users must be subscribed to DirecTV or U-verse TV as well. The service will start at $100/month for a single subscriber. Two additional users can be added for $40/month each, and the fourth is free. There's also one more caveat: "Customers that exceed 22 gigabytes of data use in one month will have their speed throttled during peak network traffic periods." AT&T looks to do battle with T-Mobile, who has a similar four-person plan. This is one of the first major consequences of AT&T's acquisition of DirecTV last year for $48.5 billion. The company says it will soon roll out other plans to combine the services.
Re: if I have DirectTV (Score:3)
Years back I had Dish Network and Netflix and canceled Dish mostly because the content was lame - there was hardly anything worth watching aside from a few PBS shows. Even Star Trek sucked at the time. I'm not aware that the situation has changed - AT&T may just be rate-limiting sign-ups with tie-ins to see how their network holds up.
Re: if I have DirectTV (Score:4, Interesting)
It hasn't. there is ZERO reason to have cable TV or satellite TV anymore.
Even the sports wierdows can watch it online with far better coverage than what the TV channels deliver.
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Finally, for some of the breaks, they just show the text "your program will return shortly" - that just seems so un-American not to have a commercial there.
Wait, you are complaining that they didn't show you a commercial? Sounds like heaven.
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When I subscribed to DirecTV (about a year ago?) it was $70 a month for me. Why would I want to pay $100 a month now for less service? $8 for Netflix is just fine for me.
Sheesh, its 2015. (Score:1)
AT&T Cannot possibly go out with a underdefined caveat such as "peak network traffic periods" for a bloody $100/mo contract.
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So, which of naive, delusional, or insane would you fall into?
Unless someone passes a law which defines in what precise ways AT&T can fuck over their customers, what on Earth makes you think they can't just make shit up as they go?
Cannot possibly? Sorry, but you have nothing to back that up. Certainly not reality.
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In practice, "peak periods" would probably end up interpreted as those periods when the tower to which your device is associated is at or very near capacity, as opposed to those periods when said tower has unused time slots. Unused time slots on a tower probably happen most often in early mornings local time. Perhaps you wanted AT&T to spell it out as satellite ISPs do, where "peak" means 5 AM to midnight and off-peak data is not metered at all.
Two catches (Score:5, Insightful)
>> catch: users must be subscribed to DirecTV or U-verse TV
I'd expect the other catch is "also, we can cancel or change the 'unlimited' bit at any time' - only suckers need apply.
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One more: since the announcement does not specify otherwise, one can presume that 22GB per customer means 22GB per contract.
Got 4 phones on a contract? Share that 22GB between all of you, which makes it 5.5GB/phone, which isn't a lot.
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5 phones == $300/mo. with 5.5 GB/phone With Straighttalk (which runs on the ATT network in our area) I pay $41.25/mo == $207/mo with 5Gb/phone and they are all on independent contracts. Also, if you can time it right, you can get it even lower during their specials (I am paying ~$36/mo at the moment). I don't see this new deal as anything but closing a gap partially with the competition but still lagging.
Bringing it back? (Score:4, Insightful)
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My grandfathered unlimited plan with subsidized phone was barely more expensive than a 1GB metered plan for many years, but I didn't get tethering. With the advent of plans that don't included a subsidy plus the coming price increase for grandfathered unlimited data I may finally be motivated to move away, perhaps all the way to T-Mobile.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Kickstarter (Score:1)
I'd like to see a Kickstarter program to raise a few billion dollars to lay down fiber for a common carrier Gigabit Internet.
Not anyone can do it - it'd have to be someone who actually did it for Google or some other ISP who had to deal with putting physical cable down.
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fcc: guise...seriously...
It's early but this should go on the list of the best inadvertent typos of 2016.
Data while sleeping? (Score:2)
People who don't run a server or a torrent client use near zero data while sleeping. Last-mile Internet connections are usually considered "burstable". So perhaps it can be thought of as 0.067 Mbps burstable to whatever rate while you're actively using the connection.
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Count me disgusted.
Does that mean you're signing up?
Mobile data (Score:3)
Yeah watching movies on a 5 inch screen sure is awesome.
If you have HDMI, you should have wired Internet (Score:2)
If you have access to a sufficiently large display that takes HDMI input, then you probably have access to an Internet connection with a wired last mile in addition to your mobile Internet connection. An Internet connection with a wired last mile will more than likely be priced much lower per gigabyte.
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How do you figure this? I can buy a "sufficiently large display that takes HDMI input" at any big box store or on Amazon, take in my car anywhere I want, including my cabin in the woods if I'm so inclined. I can't buy an "internet connection with a wired last mile" and put it where I want. Huge areas of the US are not covered by high speed internet providers, which is why the prevelance of satellite internet exists. It's also a big reason people like myself would love to have the ability to get a large
Let's explore an analogy to electric power (Score:2)
I can buy a "sufficiently large display that takes HDMI input" at any big box store or on Amazon, take in my car anywhere I want, including my cabin in the woods if I'm so inclined.
How did your cabin in the woods end up having electric power to run your monitor? Perhaps a similar chain of events leading to its having electric power could be adapted to providing it with Internet access.
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I would love this. Our electric co-op is asked about this regularly, and I'm one of the ones that ask. They already have the customer base, the easements for running lines, and a large amount of the infrastructure work done. This is how electricity made it out to the rural areas back in the early days, and for large parts of of the country, co-op's still run the electric distribution. Some co-ops have started "trials" to provide internet, but ours still says it's not profitable and they are "watching ot
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Oh, but you can. I have DSL at home - home is (I'm not there until spring) NW Maine and many miles from the nearest village (not even a big town - 1200 people counting the general area that is the village). I paid for better lines and a CO. A neighbor chipped a little in to pay for what goes past my house. Their one mile did, a little, lower the per-mile cost so it worked.
It's expensive, let's be honest, but you can probably do it. I used to have point-to-point radio and I had satellite before that. I'm als
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So you're on the bus watching a movie on your iPhone with an HDMI connection to what exactly?
Farmhouse (Score:2)
To a farmhouse that has electric power but the only Internet options are sat and cell, both harshly capped. It doesn't take a lot of All in the Family reruns to exhaust the typical monthly data allowance on sat or cell.
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Well I got yelled at when I carried my 110" projection TV onto the train so I could watch a movie, so now I just use my phone.
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And there's the rub ... because now everybody is starting to lie to us about how awesome 4K video is going to be.
They can't even keep up with streaming current video without giving you an absurdly crippled usage amount. WTF do they think will happen with the 4K video they want to tell us they can do?
Internet and mobile companies have been lying to us about just how awesome their data plans will be for years. They love to say how we
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WTF do they think will happen with the 4K video they want to tell us they can do?
It'll be sent over U-verse wired Internet, which is cheaper per GB than the cellular network.
Stream everything from the cloud to a tiny little screen? Why the hell would I want to do that?
I imagine it's for passengers on long car or bus trips. But for that, picture quality comparable to DVD ought to be enough.
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Really? I dont have any torrenting going on and I see lots of data use at night while computers and devices pull software updates. home automation and security cameras as well.
Maybe back in 1999 when everyone owned one computer only they turned off at night this was the case, but today you have a constant data use stream on the internet with all the phones, tablets, smart watches, security, cameras, etc all pull updates at night and pull data streams for information updates.
Outside cable and DSL service area (Score:2)
Some people live outside the service area of cable and DSL but can get a mobile data signal. But I will acknowledge that this edge case might not be common enough to warrant investment.
How about? (Score:1)
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The blame is with Google on that one. They provided the carriers a way to have their own update process. That should never have been allowed for the Nexus product line.
Nexus 6 here too, and still no update. Fuck AT&T. I'm half tempted to dump DirecTV just because AT&T now owns it.
Dear AT&T.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would LOVE uverse... But your refuse to build out the fiber to cover the city. Instead you stopped 5 years ago just outside of town and have done nothing at all since.
If you want more Uverse subscribers, freaking build it out so that people can actually have it as a choice.
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^This! I recently moved, and my first choice was Google Fiber. Except that they didn't serve that area yet. My 2nd choice was Uverse. Same problem. Time Warner got my business by default.
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I would LOVE uverse... But your refuse to build out the fiber to cover the city. Instead you stopped 5 years ago just outside of town and have done nothing at all since.
If you want more Uverse subscribers, freaking build it out so that people can actually have it as a choice.
U-Verse is not necessarily fiber. I had it a couple of years ago and it was ADSL based. Got rid of it because AT&T thinks that they can do HD with 3.14 Mbps. It was horrible.
They claim to have more HD channels than their competitors. In reality, the didn't have ANY HD channels.
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Even worse, they started calling DSL Uverse. Got the ad blitz so I thought they actually had fiber here. Got the DSL self install kit instead of fiber install kit and called without even hooking it up as I know I'll only get 768k DSL here, as max speed.
Still took over a year to convince AT&T we ere not paying as at least they had a 30 day return/cancel thing going.
Hey, market rules (Score:1)
If everybody holds out (there's a word for that), we can get them to offer a real unlimited plan...Consumers have to do a little collusion of their own.
Verb? Or adjective? (Score:2)
It occurs to me that "unlimited" can read one of two different ways, depending on whether the "limited" in the term is either being used as a verb or adjective.
If they are using the adjective form, then they can call something that they throttle "unlimited" without any realy conflict.... there even though they may be throttling the data speed, there is no predefined limit on the amount of data that they can receive, and so "unlimited" applies, as an adjective.
However, it does *NOT* apply if the term "l
Meanwhile, my grandfathered unlimited ... (Score:3, Interesting)
... just keeps getting more expensive. In the grand scheme of things, that $5/mo price increase for my age-old unlimited data plan is not a big deal. The problem is that it reminds me just how far we can trust these companies. They expect us to hold up our end of the bargain (2 year contracts, phone leases, etc) but they don't do their part (SLAs, uptime, throughput that matches advertised speeds, etc).
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Not that it matters but what good is it when they throttle you anyway. Ok, you get unlimited data....but at 1-25kbs. The frustration was enough to make me jump ship.
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Interesting. I never get anywhere near the throttle point so I've never really noticed. I am definitely going to look into this now that you mention it!
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Yea, if you don't download music or watch a ton of vids like I do on commutes its probably hard to tell with out tethering.