AT&T Axes Budget Texting, Leaves Only Most Expensive Unlimited

From DailyTech: AT&T, Inc. looks to continue its modifications to its smartphone plans, announcing this week that it would soon be terminating the budget texting tier and forcing new customers to either enter the $20 USD/month "unlimited" tier, agree to more expensive pay-per-text fees, or forgo texting altogether. AT&T does also offer a consolidated $30 USD/month tier for family lines, which offers a slight discount.

The budget tier was a relatively good deal -- $10 USD for 1,000 messages, or roughly $0.01 USD per message. Sadly, such days of budget-friendly plans on AT&T are long gone.

Text messaging is becoming a cash cow for AT&T. SMS texting is typically relegated to "slow" connections on phone networks. And an SMS text is around 140 bytes. So at AT&T's own 2 GB for $25 USD/month plan, you would have to send 12,271,335 texts to get your money's worth. Or assuming we're talking MMS texts, which have fancy pants pictures, you'd have to send 1638 1280x768 pictures to get your $20 USD/month worth on the texting plan.

In other words, AT&T is grossly overcharging people on texting, in almost all cases, based on its own data plans. Of course, it's not the only carrier to be doing this.

The new rules go into effect on August 21, at which time the $10 texting offer will vanish for new plans. Current customers can keep their $10 USD/month tier plans.

For those that want to get away from carrier texting altogether, you could always go the Google Voice route for free outgoing and incoming texts. On the downside, however, Google Voice doesn’t currently support MMS and you’ll have to deal with another phone number.

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