AT&T launched two new data plans on Sunday, Nov. 2, offering their customers more gigabytes of data for a lower price tag, CNN reported.
Starting on Sunday, AT&T will be offering its customers the chance to choose between two new data plans, either 3GB of data for a price of $40 per month or 6GB for $70 a month. This is a change from their previous offers of 2GB for $40 a month and 4GB for $70 a month.
AT&T also charges customers a monthly fee of $40 to get "smartphone access charge." With AT&T Next, customers not only get a new smartphone every year, but their monthly fee only comes up to $25 per line. Not only that, but the telecommunications company's value plan offers include unlimited talk and text.
Unlike AT&T's decision to focus on the lower end of the pricing curve, Verizon made a similar move by offering More Everything plans, according to Forbes.
The company previously offered 6GB for $80, 10GB for $100, 16GB for $130, and 20GB for $150. They have now switched it up to 10GB for $80, 15GB for $100, 30GB for $130, and finally 40GB for $150.
In addition to their new shared data plan, their smartphone offers also cost $15-40 a month depending on if the phone is bought over the counter, by contract or installment.
AT&T's announcement of their new data plans come amidst accusations of the company deceiving their smartphone users for the past three years, The New York Times claimed. AT&T offered customers a supposedly unlimited data plan, but claimed that their connection will slow down the more data they used.
The company is now being sued by the Federal Trade Commission for having "misled millions of its smartphone customers by charging them for 'unlimited' data plans while reducing their data speeds, in some cases by nearly 90 percent," according to a statement released Tuesday, Oct. 28 by FTC's chairwoman, Edith Ramirez on their official website.
In 2011, AT&T would begin to phase out the service and begin looking into the data speeds of its heavy users, as they announced in their official website.
However, the FTC said that AT&T did not "adequately" inform their customers and slowed down their data speeds enough to prevent most of them from being able to stream movies, load websites or use the phone's GPS function. They claimed that 3.5 million customers have been "throttled" 25 million times.
FTC claimed that they have filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division and are awaiting results.
