Today the mobile broadband industry took a step backwards as AT&T proved itself to be even more irrelevant by going back to capped data plans. From what I've gathered they plan to remove their $30 unlimited plan and more to a 2-tier approach to data:
- Data Plus - 200MB of data for $15 per month. This supposedly will cover ~65% of their customers.
- Data Pro - 2GB of data for $25 per month. This will accommodate ~98% of their customers
Tethering will be an additional $20 per month on top of their data pro plan.
AT&T has made these plan changes and masqueraded them as a cost-saving measure for the customer, however corporations never act without a self-interest. Make no mistake, this is a move to bring tighter regulation to their network and this change will ripple through every carrier, with Verizon's CEO already declaring similar intentions last month in a remark about the cellular industry's move away from unlimited plans and towards "buckets of MBs". To me this seems eerily familiar to the early 2000s, where a 20MB data plan was the goto.
Personally I feel this is a terrible move for the consumer. Their stock has been mostly stable today so the investors aren't saying much but overall this is just a huge step backwards for the industry. The internet does not work as a regulated entity. You absolutely cannot have these sorts of caps in place without completely discouraging innovation and exciting, new development. The message to consumers needs to be to use your smart phone more and more, and not worry about the data, and the message needs to be loud.
AT&T had the audacity to advertise this move as a step forward in their commitment to mobile services including streaming video. How anyone could make this claim escapes me. 2GB is not, and certainly will not be in the future, enough data for any sort of interactive, streaming content. Listening to an hour of high quality audio, such as that played by Pandora, will easily consume 5% of a 2GB bandwidth cap, watching YouTube will suck it faster, and the applications of tomorrow will eat that cap for breakfast.
To be frank moves like this, towards further regulation and control, stifle future innovation. I, for one, am tired of the cat-and-mouse game I have been playing with service providers for the past 10 years in hidden bandwidth caps and surcharges. It didn't work with dial-up, it didn't work with broadband (although they are still trying!), and it's not going to work with mobile data connections.
I believe that technologies like WiMax and LTE will do for internet access what cellphones did for landlines and free us from wires once again. There is more than enough bandwidth in the air for this to happen, and the sooner these companies stop trying to monetize and exploit a truly fundamental change our communications infrastructure, the sooner it will.
Services like the internet will only strive when data is free, packets are neutral ground, and innovation is allowed to flourish.
