AT&T and T-Mobile’s mutual contempt for one another is producing better deals for many wireless customers. AT&T this weekend announced that it’s cut the price of its 2GB Mobile Share Value to $65, or $15 less than the original price. Although the plan only offers 2GB of data, it does give you unlimited voice and text, “as well as unlimited international messaging from the U.S. to select countries,” so it could definitely be a sweet deal for anyone who doesn’t gorge themselves on LTE data every month.
For its part T-Mobile has boosted the monthly data allotments for its lower-tiered data plans from 500MB to 1GB on the $50 Simple Choice plan and from 2.5GB to 3GB on its $60 plan. There’s some bad news here, however: The price of T-Mobile’s plan for unlimited voice, text and data has increased to $80 from $70. T-Mobile is now offering a 5GB plan for $70 a month that will also include 5GB of tethering data, or double the 2.5GB of tethering data that the carrier’s 5GB plan previously offered. What’s more T-Mobile is now letting subscribers send an unlimited number of international text messages from the United States, which helps make up for the price increase to the unlimited plan.
As always, T-Mobile CEO John Legere couldn’t resist using the new T-Mobile announcement as an opportunity to slam his rivals at Verizon and AT&T and particularly took shots at the overage fees that they slap their customers with for going over their monthly data caps.
“In the mobile age, wireless data caps and overage fees are just this side of extortion,” Legere said. “Take the basic plans from the Big Two with ridiculously low data limits that hit you with fat overages each month. It’s like getting your data from the neighborhood loan shark and paying 100% interest when the bill comes due. It’s the classic shakedown.”
