AT&T’s Cheryl Choy, VP of data and voice products, announced on Friday that the company will be dishing out 1TB of data a month to U-Verse Internet customers with plans zipping along at up to 300 megabits per second starting August 21. The company believes this should be enough data to stream more than 13 hours of HD video content per day.
Right now, customers on tiers ranging from 768 kilobits per second (Kbps) to 6 megabits per second (Mbps) get 300GB of data per month, whereas customers subscribing to tiers ranging from 12Mbps to 75Mbps get 600GB of data usage a month. AT&T seems to be trimming down all the tier confusion by offering a new single cap for every customer speeding at up to 300Mbps.
If that’s not enough data, AT&T will gladly charge customers if they go over their monthly allowance. For $10, customers can get a measly 50GB of data during the current billing cycle. According to the company, the maximum monthly overage charge is $100, which equals out to 500GB of additional data.
However, customers will not be charged overage fees during the month they initially break through the data cap. In the following month, customers will receive warnings when they hit 65-percent, 90-percent, and 100-percent, but won’t see overage charges on their bill. For each month thereafter, customers will receive the warnings and be charged for each 50GB over the limit up to $100.
To bypass all this data limit mess, U-Verse customers without DirecTV or the U-Verse TV service can get unlimited data in the home for an additional $30 a month. Choy said that these customers can switch to the unlimited plan anytime they want, even during the middle of a billing cycle. U-Verse Internet customers with DirecTV or U-Verse TV already receive unlimited data.
“If you have AT&T U-verse Internet and DirecTV or U-verse TV service and pay for your services on a single bill, or if you subscribe to the 1Gbps speed tier on the AT&T GigaPower network, you will automatically get unlimited home internet data at no additional charge,” Choy said. “That’s a value worth $30 a month.”
Choy also said that AT&T will begin alerting U-Verse Internet customers about the data cap change and unlimited data offering starting August 1. Expect to see these notifications in the monthly statement, email, online advertisements, and articles like the one you’re reading now.
In addition to the U-Verse upgrade, customers of AT&T’s GigaPower service subscribing to the one-gigabit-per-second (1Gbps) tier are now getting unlimited data usage in the home. Previously, they were only allowed 1TB of data usage each month, so the unlimited flow to and from AT&T’s servers is a surprising, and huge, upgrade to these dedicated customers.
Previously, AT&T introduced the unlimited data option to customers who subscribed only to the U-Verse Internet service back in May. The company also provided a slight increase on the data caps that customers are now enjoying, moving up from 250GB for customers on tiers between 768Kbps to 75Mbps, and up from 500GB for customers on the 100Mbps to 1Gbps tier. That said, AT&T seems to be in a giving mood as of late.
