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T-Mobile is going to bring Tiered Data Pricing into the mix
Brandon Davenport
According to the WSJ, T-Mobile will be joining AT&T and Verizon, “offering” us tiered data plans. This could go one of two ways — it could go somewhat smoothly, or it could be a total nightmare — but no matter what happens, T-Mobile will be laughing all the way to the bank.
T-Mobile announced this morning a fleet of new data pricing changes and the official arrival of their new tethering plan.
According to DSL Reports, T-Mobile is now offering two new plans — The Web 200MB plan brings 200 MB of usage for a somewhat reasonable $10 a month with a two-year contract or $15 a month with no contract.
The Web Unlimited plan remains at a pretty fair $30 for “unlimited” (but what T-Mobile means by “unlimited” is you get 5GB of usage and then they throttle you back to 64 kbps for the remainder of your billing cycle) — and as speculated, T-Mobile is now making tethering an additional $15 per month, but it can only be used with the “unlimited” plan.
So in summary, things aren’t looking to horrible at the moment, but this is just the first implementation of tiered pricing among cell carriers. Soon these plans could become more and more segmented, and we could be heading into un-known territory of a locked-down mobile internet.
