Mobile-industry observers are scrambling to assess the ramifications of AT&T’s announcement Wednesday that it will scrap its unlimited mobile data plan for new smartphone customers. Two new offerings slated for introduction on June 7 will be priced at $15 per month for 200MB and $25 per month for 2GB, the company said.
AT&T said 65 percent of its existing mobile data-plan subscribers would have their monthly data needs met by the new $15 plan, while 98 percent would be served by the $25 offering. However, the wireless carrier added that subscribers who exceed monthly data caps will have to pay overage fees: $15 for each additional 200MB under AT&T’s lower-cost offering and $10 for each additional 1GB of data under the higher-priced plan.
Both data plans represent an opportunity for virtually all of AT&T’s data customers to reduce their monthly data charges, noted Charles Golvin, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. “For consumer-product strategists, this change shows a remarkably — and, for some, surprisingly — customer-centric viewpoint,” Golvin wrote in a blog.
Extracting Greater Value
The new capped-data plans potentially give AT&T a better handle on the minority of smartphone subscribers who download huge amounts of data. But Golvin thinks there are more important reasons for carriers to adopt new data-pricing strategies, such as earning more revenue when they launch next-generation 4G networks, which will enable users to consume significantly more data than today’s networks can deliver.
“They need a pricing strategy that will allow them to charge a premium and extract greater value from these networks,” Golvin wrote. “Flat-rate pricing will prevent them from realizing that value and limits their future data revenue,” whereas the new pricing strategy will enable AT&T “to charge a premium and extract greater value.”
But not everyone is certain about the long-term effects of AT&T’s new pricing strategy….