Today, AT&T announced a new “Mobile Share Value” structure in its existing Mobile Share wireless plans and it will be rolled out on December 8th, which focus on offering discounts if the subscribers are not on any device contract.
AT&T tries to improve virtually every aspect of the Mobile Share plans, but the discounts are not as straight and simple as the current plans. However, many Mobile Share subscriber will see a bit in price drop in their bills, but the heavy data users will get affected by this tinkering. The flat $40 will be the standardized fee for the smartphone attached to the Mobile Share plan, which was previously $30 to $50 depending on the plans. If the smartphone is out of the contract, then you have to pay $25, which was $40 before.
If your family has 3 or more smartphones (on contract) attached to a 6GB Mobile Share or a larger plan, then per-smartphone fee will be $5 to $10 more. There will be a very small discounts for most popular plans such as 1GB, 2GB or 4GB. Hence, the company is providing more discounts to off-contract device owners and lure in more customers from other networks. However, this could also cost the company with unsubscribing rates in next few months.
Recently, T-Mobile also introduced the very similar plan to its subscribers and few analysts found this as the response to the AT&T’s own unpopular AT&T Next. However, for AT&T Next, the company will be offering a new 18-month upgrade option, which will enable the subscribers to pay less monthly fee for devices with the tenure of over 26 months than the current 20 months tenure. Additionally, they can also trade-in their smartphones every 18 months, where the current limit is 12 months.
AT&T said that it will not upgrade current customers to the Mobile Share Value plan automatically, instead it recommended the subscribers to “keep in touch” with AT&T after the roll out and we recommend, just calm down and they will contact you for upgrade.
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