[nerdtalker]

AT&T silently killed what formerly was an unlimited plan out of the blue one day, and not many people noticed. I would constantly run into the 3 GB limit a week or two into the month and then suffer through the slow throttled 0.5 Mbps rates for the rest of the billing cycle in agony.

At that point I realized I was essentially paying for a 3 GB data plan (remember, no tethering provisioning was included or even could be added) under the auspices of an 'unlimited' tier. I switched to mobile shared but that turned out to be a huge mistake for other reasons (among which was that corporate discount codes didn't apply to the $30 phone fee on top of the bucket charge), and then shortly after that left for T-Mobile where I now have a real unlimited plan for less money. Not the full speed tiers + throttled data after that plan mind you, the actual unlimited plan.

What's really disappointing is that it took the FTC until now to build a case or whatever legal burden is required to go after AT&T for their elaborate bait-and-switch. This is years after the fact, and I wonder how much extra money AT&T made as a result.

[sleazebreeze]

What did you think was a mistake about the mobile shared plan? I just switched to that for my single device and I was enjoying the money saved. Am I missing a "gotcha"?

[nerdtalker]

My problems were really two fold:

* I previously had a 23% discount (FAN code) on my account which applied to the unlimited data lines in a favorable way. In essence, it applied to both the $30/month data fee for Unlimited, and the couple hundred minutes of call and unlimited text family plan which were sort of an umbrella for all the lines. With mobile shared, one of the gotchas I didn't discover until well after the first bill (since the perpetual excuse with a FAN code discount is – it takes a while to apply) was that the discount applies only to the mobile shared data bucket charge, not to the $30/phone, $x/tablet, $x/modem device access charge line items which quickly add up if you have more than a single line. This really threw off the math I had done for affordability and made it more expensive for me.

* The tiers previously were structured a bit differently, and with the two lines I had plus another person, I would always hit the 10 GB I had signed up for, then pay the $15/GB overage. Going to the next tier up to avoid paying overage for a GB or two would've still been more expensive, so like clockwork I would always end up paying some overages. Since then they've doubled some of the larger tiers as a reactionary measure.

Affordability wise quite honestly AT&T is close to parity with T-Mobile if you manage to get the mobile shared value plans which have cheaper monthly rates if you bring your own device or buy without a contract.

[smackfu]

Some people don't realize that the real cheap rates are because you are giving up a subsidy, and that your next new phone will raise the rates again. OTOH I personally think that's a benefit since I can choose to get the subsidy or Next or just buy the phone outright.