Commentary

Ed Hansberry
 
See more from this author

AT&T Confirms Shared Data Plan

Shared minute plans have been around for a while, but data has always been on a per-device basis. That may be changing soon.

| Ed Hansberry | June 03, 2011 12:08 PM

When you have multiple people in your family or multiple devices, having separate full cell phone contracts can be expensive--prohibitively so.

Carriers long ago recognized this and came up with voice plans where you purchased a pool of minutes and shared them among family members. When texting became popular, similar pooled text message plans became options at some carriers. Billing has not kept up with technology though. Now that data plans are popular, and have been for several years, we still have no way to share data pools with family members or multiple personal devices. AT&T at least acknowledged that shared data plans are under consideration.

SPECIAL REPORT
AT&T Makes Its Move On T-Mobile
AT&T Makes Its Move On T-Mobile
See Special Report>>

More Mobility Insights

Webcasts

More >>

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

It is unclear exactly what AT&T CEO meant when he said, "But once you have so many devices that you carry, you may want a shared plan. The more focus groups we do, the more we think that may be the way. We're working on it. It will be soon." It may be similar to voice and SMS plans where anyone on the family plan gets to pull from the common pool of resources.

It may be geared, however, towards people with one voice device and multiple data devices. People typically have one personal phone, but they may have a tablet, MiFi, netbook, data dongle, or other data device. Some people though, mobile device geeks in particular, may have multiple phones. With GSM carriers like AT&T, it is real easy to swap out the SIM card to quickly change the phone you are using, but that can be a pain if you want to get email on one device and play an online game with another. A lot of rebooting happens when swapping out SIM cards. If AT&T allows people to use several different phone devices, that process becomes much easier. The next logical step then is to allow a family to pull from a common data pool.

We'll have to wait and see what AT&T's intentions are and what the pricing would be. With voice plans, carriers typically charge $10 for each additional device that pulls from the pool. This news may also spur other carriers to follow with their own share data plans.

, join the conversation

Related Reading

News

Most Popular

Commentary

On the Web

More On the Web»

Video

Slideshow



Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.

Comments:

Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links