AT&T messes with plans in wake of Verizon's moves, slashes unlimited voice pricing
By Chris Ziegler 
posted January 15th 2010 5:16PM
posted January 15th 2010 5:16PM
Sprint's talking about it, but AT&T's straight-up doing something about Verizon's plan adjustments this morning with a series of its own tweaks this afternoon. Starting Monday, January 18 (conveniently the same day that Verizon's changes go live), unlimited talk will run $69.99 on individual plans, a nice little cut of $30 against the $99.99 the carrier charges today; family unlimited, meanwhile, comes in at $119.99. Unlimited talk and text costs another $20 on top of unlimited talk alone -- no change from the current add-on pricing. Similarly, unlimited talk plus smartphone data goes for $99.99, meaning that you're paying $30 for the data package -- exactly the same as you're paying now, so really, this all boils down to a big adjustment in what carriers across the board are charging for voice. The principles of Econ 101 have us believe that voice isn't as popular as it used to be -- we are now sending billions upon billions of texts, after all -- and as we ease off the voice infrastructure, it makes sense that these guys would want to upsell everyone into unlimited plans (remember that we're living in an "all you can eat" kind of nation) while still banking big on precious kilobytes and characters. Well played, AT&T; you too, Verizon. Well played, indeed.
Hmmm.. AT&T is responding to Verizon, clearly, but it's questionable how much farther Verizon can drop prices. Notice that they are raising early termination fees...
Verizon has one heck of a challenge for 4G; namely, constructing a 4g network that will hand off down to 3G and 2G properly. Given that Qualcomm dumped UMB in favor of LTE, Verizon's upgrade path with its current CDMA2000 architecture is limited, so it will have to adapt its network for a 4G rollout.
Both T-Mobile and AT&T Mobility utilize UMTS (W/CDMA), so the network architecture for LTE is more inline with their upgrade path, being an evolution of the current UMTS system.
Sprint had enough brains to ensure that the antennas and such that they purchased to roll Wi-Max 4G were compatible with LTE, so even if they have to switch base stations in the future the downtime should be minimal. They're going to have fun with the CDMA and iDen migration to 4G though. Keep in mind Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint, used to run AT&T Wireless (before it became Cingular before it became AT&T Mobility).