AT&T rolls out new data plan structure

Essentially, there is very little market for "new" cellular customers in the U.S. Let's face it - we now see everyone from "12-year-olds to great-grandma" with a smartphone at this point.

So the battle is now over PRICING, FEATURES, and DATA,DATA,DATA. Did I mention data?

AT&T announced a new structure yesterday in this war. In not so many words, what it basically does is move back closer to the glory days of "unlimited" that we all had a few years ago. Or at least it is a step that direction. They are eliminating "overage" charges on all plans except for the very lowest one and replacing them with choked data once you have reached your plan limit. And their move follows one recently announced by Verizon.

Now, you may say, "Hey, Sprint has been doing that for a while now in many areas." And you would be correct. BUT, actually all of the carriers have been "toying" with data throttling in the high-saturation envelopes for some time. This is why you can find many posts here on this very forum where one driver posts a pretty screenshot of his or her current usage and bill showing 100 Gigs with no issues. Then, two posts later, a driver will report a serious data throttle after 20 Gigs on his bill last month. It has to do with the datacenter usage "bucket" from state-to-state, region-to-region, city-to-city. If that bucket is relatively full, then you don't get throttled. If it is getting low, you get throttled.

So why is this new, or significant? Because in their quest to RETAIN or GAIN the current saturated market, the carriers have to now come out of the shadows with stuff that they were doing, but none of us actually understood "the pattern" to it. They are disclosing exact throttling policies, they are creating more and more "rollover" policies, and more "shared" policies. And they are LOWERING user costs in various ways AT THE SAME TIME in a race to the bottom-line deal.

It has been a painful few years for truckers as these guys expand their infrastructure, for sure. But I think that as this progresses, it will only get cheaper, more reliable, and faster for the OTR life sooner rather than later over the coming months as these carriers expand the brutal war for market share.

ATT announcement link