The new data-only plans, announced Monday, start at $30 a month for 4 GB and scale up to $335 for 50 GB a month. Consumers can add up to 10 devices to their plans – each tablet or gaming device costing $10 a month and each laptop or modem costing $20 – and small businesses can add up to 25. In addition to the new data-only tiers, AT&T plans to supersize all of its shared plans, offering 30 GB, 40 GB and 50 GB buckets to both consumers and small businesses.

When you compare the new data-only plans to its regular data share pricing plans, the differences are substantial. A 4 GB plan on a regular mobile share plan costs $70 a month, $40 more than the equivalent data-only plan. At higher tiers the discount is just as big: a 20 GB regular share plan costs $200, while the data-only version costs only $110.

AT&T justifies the differences in pricing through the inclusion of unlimited voice and SMS in its regular plans, while data-only plans, by definition, include no such benefits. But AT&T’s complex shared plan framework actually double-charges customers for those traditional telephony and messaging services. Connecting a smartphone or feature phone to the AT&T network costs anywhere from $30 to $45 a month, and you would assume that those premium rates reflect the cost of voice and SMS.

The good news is AT&T is encouraging the use of data-only devices on its network. It wants to usher in the tablet and mobile-connected revolution on its networks so it’s offering steep data discounts for those use cases. It’s a trend we’re likely to see throughout the U.S. mobile industry. The problem is AT&T seems to be inadvertently punishing the large majority of smartphone subscribers in the process.

Here’s an example: If you were a data-only customer with two tablets and a 4G mobile hotspot, you could get a data-only plan that would allow you pool 10 GB a month between your three devices for the very reasonable rate of $100 a month. Now if you were to add a single smartphone to the same plan you wouldn’t just be tacking on a $30-$40 standard connection charge. Instead, you would wind up paying $190 a month by moving to a mixed voice-and-data plan. Basically you wind up spending nearly double to add talk and text to single gadget in a four-device plan – that does not seem like a fair deal to me.

I applaud AT&T for offering cheaper data options and exploring the concept of a data-only mobile service. But in the process it’s also exposing the fundamental flaws of its regular shared plans. AT&T really needs to do away with the complex system of sliding connection fees, which ultimately charge different rates for data depending on the device you use. Instead, it should make it clear as day what it’s charging for voice, SMS and the cost of connecting a device. Then it should just sell us data at a set universal price.

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Verizon’s plans went into effect last month, and they are mandatory for all new customers. Current subscribers on Verizon’s individual tiered data plans can keep their rates for the time being, but customers grandfathered into Verizon’s old unlimited plans will have a tough choice to make when they upgrade to their next devices: They can either pay full retail cost for the phone or chose between a shared or tiered individual plan.

AT&T’s shared plans will take effect in late August, though it hasn’t revealed an exact date. AT&T’s will be purely optional for new and existing customers.

First, you need to select a data bucket. The following prices are for shared data between any number of devices either directly connected to the carriers network or tethered via Wi-Fi or cable. For instance if you buy a 6 GB bucket, all of your devices will draw from the monthly 6 GB pool. If you go over that allotment both carriers charge $15 for every additional gigabyte.

Now that you’ve got your data, select the number and types of devices you and your family will use. The reason for the different rates for smartphones, modems, tablets and feature phones is due to the fact that both AT&T and Verizon bundle in unlimited SMS and voice with each device. Feature phones make lots of phone calls and send lots of text messages while tablets do not. Why both carriers are discriminating between the all-data connectivity of a modem versus a tablet is beyond me, but they do.

All of these prices are per device so if you have both a tablet and a feature phone, your monthly device connection fee will be $40, the total of the $10 slate fee and the $30 phone fee. If it’s four smartphones, Verizon will charge you $160. As you’ve probably noticed, AT&T’s smartphone fees are variable, depending on the size of the shared data bucket you buy. That brings us to our next chart.

AT&T charges less to connect smartphones if you invest in more data. That may seem like it gives AT&T a big advantage over Verizon, but in most cases Big Red charges lower rates for the data itself. Whether you save money on one carrier versus the other depends on which combination of devices and plan you sign up for.

Take the individual user with a single smartphone that wants to use his phone as a mobile hotspot. A moderate user just looking for basic connectivity could sign up for an AT&T 1 GB plan and pay $95 $85 a month, while the same plan on Verizon would cost $100 $90. However, if that same single-smartphone customer committed to 4 GBs, the carriers would offer the same price point, $110 a month. And if he bumped up usage to 10 GB a month, Verizon comes out on top charging $140 versus AT&T’s $150.

When you start adding more devices to the plan, the numbers get more complicated. An AT&T plan with four smartphones costs $240 compared to Verizon’s price of $260. But if that same data plan connected two smartphones and two tablets, you’d pay the same rate on both carriers, $200.

It’s not a hard and fast rule, but in general if you’re looking to connect more smartphones, AT&T comes out on top, but if maxing out data usage or connecting a lot of non-smartphone devices is important to you, Verizon’s plans fare better.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

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Here’s the full statement as published in the Gray Lady’s Bits blog:

• Customers will not be automatically moved to new shared data plans. If a 3G or 4G smartphone customer is on an unlimited plan now and they do not want to change their plan, they will not have to do so.
• When we introduce our new shared data plans, Unlimited Data will no longer be available to customers when purchasing handsets at discounted pricing.
• Customers who purchase phones at full retail price and are on an unlimited smartphone data plan will be able to keep that plan.
• The same pricing and policies will be applied to all 3G and 4GLTE smartphones.

What that means is that you can probably cling to your unlimited plan from now until the end of time, like some old codger that refuses to give up his party line. But Verizon isn’t going to make it easy on you. The people who like unlimited data tend to be the people who like high-end smartphones, and since Verizon will no longer cut them deals when they upgrade to newer and better devices, they’ll be on the hook for full sticker price. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the prices on a brand new unlocked iPhone lately, but they ain’t cheap: $650 to $850 depending on the model.

The odd thing is, depending on how they’re priced, Verizon’s new shared plans might actually wind up saving a lot of current unlimited customers money. For instance, if you’re in a household with two smartphones both grandfathered to unlimited, you’re basically paying $60 a month for data. If Verizon keeps its same pricing structure in place you could get 2 GB to share for half the monthly cost, plus whatever per line charges Verizon chooses to charge.

The larger majority of U.S. smartphone users consume less than 1 GB of data a month. There are still plenty of people who use their unlimited data plans to the hilt – many of them GigaOM readers – and they’re going to hate this policy change in the very cores of their beings. But my bet is that a lot of people currently on unlimited plans might benefit from switching over to shared data. We’ll have to see the details of Verizon’s shared pricing, though, before we can say for sure.

Buffet image courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

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When U.S. Cellular launched its first LTE tablet in March, it was charging 25 cents for every megabyte over the cap consumed. That works out to be about $250 per gigabyte used in excess of a customer’s plan. This week it restructured its plans so that overages (except on its lowest tier plan) are charged at $10/1 GB, which is pretty much industry norm. FierceWireless reported that the carrier announced the changes at its first quarter earnings call.

U.S. Cellular also lowered the cost of the data plans themselves, aligning them with prices charged by Verizon Wireless and AT&T. It now offers 300 MBs for the $20 plan (charging $10/300 MB for overages), 2 GBs for $25, 4 GBs for $45, 5 GBs for $50 and 10 GBs for $90. At 4 GB or higher, you can also use Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities at no extra charge, but not with the lower-priced plans.

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PhoneNews.com first reported on the new pricing structure, and MetroPCS confirmed the changes today, posting the new plans on it website. Metro’s $40 plan will included 250 MB; its $50 plan 2.5 GB; and it’s $60 5 GB. The carrier will also bundle in its unlimited use of Rhapsody music streaming at the $60 tier and access to its MetroStudio video-on-demand service at the $70 one.

Once a customer surpasses those limits, MetroPCS will slow down the connections to the same speeds of its “3G” network, said Drew Crowell, a spokesman for the carrier. “Even though the speeds are reduced, they will remain on the 4G LTE network and, because of the ‘always on’ nature of our 4G LTE network, the experience for the majority of what a customer does on a daily basis, like Facebook, web surfing, streaming music, etc., should continue to be solid,” Crowell said via e-mail.

By 3G Metro is almost certainly referencing its CDMA 1X network – a 2G technology that many carriers misleadingly call 3G. Throttling back to EV-DO speeds would have little impact on network use. MetroPCS customers won’t be breaking any speed barriers with 2G data speeds, but at least the carrier won’t charge overages or simply cut its subscribers off. Save for the lone unlimited throttling-free plan, its services now look remarkably similar to T-Mobile’s, which also sells cheap buckets of smartphone data and throttles after a pre-defined cap.

Update. It turns out I was wrong. Crowell confirmed in a follow-up that when MetroPCS says “3G” it really means 3G. Customers who exceed their caps will see their connections slowed down to the equivalent of EV-DO speeds, which isn’t much of a punishment considering the majority of smartphone users rely on EV-DO and other 3G networks daily. EV-DO won’t support the multi-megabit speeds of Metro’s LTE network, but even its typical 300 Mbps-plus connections will support pretty much any application on a smartphone, save video streaming. In fact, limiting video use over its cheaper data plans may be precisely Metro’s aim here.

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Over the weekend, blogger John Cozen posted a recent e-mail exchange with AT&T about why his smartphone data connection was slowed down after he breached 2.1 GB in his last billing cycle. His argument was his usage couldn’t be subject to throttling since his data use must be well under the top 5 percent cut-off AT&T stipulates in its terms. AT&T’s response was very interesting:

“To give you a baseline – the average data use across the country by the top 5% of AT&T smartphone customers was 2GB per month, effective August 2011. The amount of data usage of our top 5% of heaviest users varies from month-to-month and by market, based on the usage of others and the ever-increasing demand for mobile broadband services. To rank among the top 5%, you must use an extraordinary amount of data in a single billing period.”

When AT&T introduced throttling in October, its highest-tier data plan was 2 GB for $25, compared to the $30 charge for unlimited plans that Cozen and millions of older AT&T customers still hold on to. That seems reasonable enough. If the 2 GB is what the top 5 percent of smartphone users consume and is at the level AT&T considers abusive, then 2 GB is a good place to set its cap, charging customers more if they exceed it.

But AT&T just overhauled its plan pricing. It’s newest mid-tier plan charges customers $30 for 3 GB. Why is AT&T inviting new customers to consume a full gigabyte more of data while telling older customers – who pay the exact same monthly fee – that 2 GB of data is excessive? My bet is that the former is really a false invitation.

When AT&T first announced these new plans, I wrote there was good and bad in them for consumers. The bad is that new subscribers will have to pay $5 more a month than their predecessors for any of AT&T’s plans. The good is that AT&T is actually lowering the per-MB charges on data, which is ultimately necessary if average mobile broadband consumption continues to grow. Now I’m not so sure.

If 2 GBs is the average use for AT&T’s 5 percent hungriest users, that means 95 percent of AT&T’s customers are well under 2 GB each month. So the vast majority of A&T customers don’t get any real benefit out of the new 3 GB plans. To them it just amounts to a $5 a month price increase.

To be fair, AT&T can’t just price for what its customers are consuming today. It has to price for where they’re going, otherwise it would just be adjusting its rates every few months. It’s not unreasonable to assume that its customers average monthly data consumption will grow beyond 2 GB in the next few years, especially as mobile video services take off. AT&T is also a business that wants to make money off of mobile data, though this may be a rather sneaky way of doing it. Ma Bell’s data rates still far undercut those of its main competitor Verizon Wireless, however.

But AT&T also claims to be facing a capacity crunch. Since its planned acquisition of T-Mobile has failed, the carrier has used every podium it can find to proclaim that its networks are reaching critical mass in an effort to justify its spectrum acquisition aims. On its fourth quarter financial call, AT&T Randall Stephenson even blamed the government’s failure to let it have T-Mobile as the reason why its forced to raise data prices.

If AT&T is so network constrained, if 2 GB of monthly usage is too much for its networks, and if it doesn’t have the spectrum to meet future demands, then why is it opening up the data spigot, actually encouraging its customers to consume more for an extra $5 a month?

iPhone image courtesy of Flickr user mark sebastian

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Verizon Wireless has no plans to lower prices on its smartphone data plans. In fact, Verizon plans to milk as much revenue from its 3G and LTE networks as possible, saying on its fourth quarter financial results call Tuesday it would establish itself as the “premium” carrier in the data market, charging its customers for quality.

That’s a bold statement considering Verizon suffered a string of LTE outages in December, challenging the credibility of its claim to be the nation’s “most reliable network.” But in general, playing up service quality has always worked for Verizon. It tends to be the highest-priced carrier of the big four, while its consumer perception ratings remain high. I’m just not sure it can maintain such a staunch stance for very long given the realities of the hyper-competitive smartphone market. A premium strategy might work if Verizon customers were all on 4G, but the majority of customers are still gravitating toward its 3G CDMA network.

Charging 4G prices for 3G services doesn’t make sense

Over the weekend, AT&T made the odd moves of both raising its data rates and boosting the ceilings on its data caps, giving new customers a better deal per megabyte consumed while almost guaranteeing they would pay higher bills than their predecessors. A new customer on AT&T will now get 1 GB, or 50 percent more data on a standard $30 plan than the same customer on Verizon. T-Mobile already far undercuts AT&T and Verizon on data fees, while Sprint is still offering unlimited plans.

The boom in smartphones and tablets and the emergence of more bandwidth-intensive applications like video are causing average monthly data consumption to skyrocket. The other operators have begun responding, not necessarily by dropping rates, but offering bigger buckets of data for the same price. Verizon seems to feel it’s immune to those price pressures. CFO Fran Shammo even stated Verizon views its data customers as occupying a high-end niche in the market.

“It’s important to note that we are a premium-priced product,” Shammo said. “We will continue to win in the market just like we did with Unleashed [prepaid data plans] even though that was priced $10 above the market. We now see that there are niches of people that want to be on the best network in the world.”

If Verizon’s data customers were only the upper echelon of smartphones users, they would all be flocking to the 4G network, but they’re not exactly coming in droves. Verizon sold 2.3 million LTE smartphones, tablets and mobile hotspots in the quarter, which seems like a lot, but not when you compare it the 7.7 million total smartphones it sold over the holidays.

Apple messes with the math. A lot of those sales were due to 4.2 million activations of iPhone 4 and 4S, which are 3G-only devices. That leaves 3.5 million smartphones, most of which were Android devices. That probably accounts for the vast majority of Verizon’s 4G activations, but it still leaves around 1 million customers who opted to get 3G phones when a 4G one was available, even though the data plan pricing for both networks remains the same. The trend was even more pronounced in the third quarter when three-quarters of all new Android device sales were in the 3G category.

The point I’m trying to make here is Verizon is still primarily a 3G operator today, and its 3G network is rather slow one at that. Unless there is a rapid shift of customers to 3G to 4G, Verizon will a hard to time justifying its high prices while its competitors drop their rates.

Will Apple come to the rescue?

Verizon does seem to be taking steps to nudge its customers over to 4G. By the end of 2011, its LTE network covered about two-thirds of the population, and it said Tuesday the 4G network will mirror its 3G network by mid-2013. LTE phones also cost more than their 3G LTE counterparts. While Shammo said Verzion won’t cut plan rates, Verizon expects LTE device prices to come down. Customers may soon have little choice but to buy a 4G phone. Verizon declared at CES it would no longer accept any smartphones that don’t have 4G connectivity.

The biggest factor in driving customers to 4G will be the launch of an LTE iPhone, which seems more and more likely this year considering the noises the operators are making. But if no LTE iPhone is forthcoming, Verizon will be in a difficult spot. It would wind up selling the most popular smartphone in the country coupled with the highest priced data plans, while simultaneously giving those iPhone customers slower network speeds and fewer gigabytes to consume. That hardly sounds like a premium service to me.

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