I might be missing the point (and I did say I disagree with the tethering charge), but another side of this that will be a big win for most people is cheeper data access. It goes from $30 a month down to $15 (plus whatever voice plan) now for minimum barrier to entry on a smartphone. Yes, AT&T (Sprint/Verizon/T-Mobile) would love everyone to just give them money and not use the service. What this move will likely mean is that AT&T will sign up even more people for data plans, and a large majority of them will never run into the overage charges even at the low 200MB entry point. So while they won't have people giving them money for nothing, they will have more people giving them some money for data.

And as far as penalizing people who go over, I find the new rules way better then the old ones. If you ran over the limit, you were billed very harsly. Now, you incur maybe an extra $10-$15, and have warnings before it happens.

A better solution that would be easily understandable to existing AT&T customers would be rollover data. With rollover (expiring after a year or so), you get the same benefit of allowing a few heavier usage months without penalty from time to time. And if you do get dinged the extra $10 a month once, then the unused part of that overage then is added into the pool, possibly eliminating the overage the next month. You get the same benefits as your plan, but without having to worry about planning for a bigger quota for a 12 month period.


They only have X number of radio spectrum slots and Y number of bits at each tower. If they continue to add new customers, they have to add more infrastructure. If people are capped at 200MB, or 2GB or some other number, it's easier to meet those demands compared to planning around unlimited use. An additional challenge comes in on the mobility side. Their infrastructure isn't mobile and only covers a small area with each tower. So to meet the demands of say me wanting to watch Netflix 24/7 on my iPad, they would need to beef up capacity at the tower near my home, near my work, and every tower around the areas I commonly hang out at. Time Warner by comparison only has to worry about improving the infrastructure at my house and any related upstream infrastructure.