Perhaps it was the resounding howls of pain from AT&T international business travelers when they opened their monthly 3G phone bills, or a fit of corporate generosity, but AT&T unveiled new international roaming data plans on Tuesday. While still pricey, they cut the cost of iPhone Web surfing overseas a great deal over previous rates. The new rates to into effect as of Wednesday, for the asking.
Package Cuts Rates Significantly
AT&T’s new data-roaming rates come not a billable minute too soon for some customers. Past rates for roaming came in at roughly $40 for 2MB of data — not hard to do when you hit YouTube or a Facebook photo gallery.
“AT&T has worked diligently to provide affordable options for international roaming because the feature-rich mobile experience of [the] iPhone is indispensable to users,” said Bill Hague, AT&T wireless operations international executive vice president. “With these new international data plans, iPhone users can access more data in more countries for less cost.”
Less cost equates to either $119 or $199 per month. The $119 plan gets you 100MB of data, while the $199 plan doubles your data to 200MB. The per-month packages can be added and deleted at will, with no penalty, giving international callers a great pay-as-you-travel option when planning overseas trips.
To that end, AT&T also announced a travel site (www.wireless.att.com/travelguide) to help customers decide on rate plans according to their itinerary. The roaming-rate packages cover more than 67 countries worldwide, including Japan and South Korea. Countries off the rate-plan list — including Venezuela and the United Arab Emirates — are charged at the standard $0.0195/KB rate.
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Asked if AT&T intends to add to the list of countries covered on the new data-plan list, Jenny Parker, spokesperson at AT&T, said, “We’re always looking to find ways to…