AT&T Adds Data & Night Minutes to Pre-Paid Phone Plans
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Richard Baguley Published on June 06, 2007 Comment on this |
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6th June 2007 - Pre-paid phone plans are generally pretty simple; you pay your money, you get a certain number of minutes per month. You don’t get access to extras like Internet access or off-peak calling. But AT&T is changing the rules: they have just announced a new set of pay as you go plans under their GoPhone brand that include free night and weekend calls, plus data access. AT&T claims that the new plans are the only pre-paid services from the major networks that offer options for free off-peak calls and Internet access. The optional add-ons to the pre-paid plans include 1MB of data transfers (such as emails, IMs or file downloads) for $4.99 a month, or 5MB for $9.99. That’s significantly cheaper than the 1 cent per kilobyte charge that the normal pre-paid plans offer; the 1MB for $4.99 plan works out at less than half a cent per kilobit, while the 5MB for $9.99 plan works out at less then a third of a cent per kilobit.
Frequent texters may also like the messaging option, which allows for up to 200 text messages a month for $4.99. That’s a cost of 2 cents a message if you use all of them; much cheaper than AT&T’s usual charge of 15 cents a message. Serious massagers may want to go for the 3000 messages for $19.99 a month option; a cost of under 0.7 cents a message. Other pre-paid plans from Verizon don’t offer similar packages, although T-Mobile do offer a pre-paid plan for the Sidekick that charges $1 a day for Internet access.
AT&T has also added night and weekend minutes to their GoPhone plans; the $39.99 a month plan now includes 1,000 minutes of off-peak calls, while the $49.99 and $69.99 plans offer unlimited night and weekend minutes. The more expensive plan also includes unlimited calling to other mobile customers.
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