A few months after Verizon launched its Share Everything plans, AT&T has announced that it too will offer shared data plans starting in August. Like Verizon, AT&T's plan offers unlimited talk and text, as well as support for up to 10 devices per account. The same basic structure underlies the AT&T and Verizon plans, but Ma Bell's implementation of the plans is where it distinguishes itself from its largest competitor.
If you recall, Verizon charges anywhere from $50 to $100 per month for 1 – 10GB of data, and each type of device you add to the plan (smartphones, tablets, feature phones, and data sticks) add an additional flat fee to the total bill. For a basic 2-smartphone 4GB Verizon plan, the total bill would run $150 ($70 for data plus $40 for each smartphone).
AT&T offers a similar but vastly different way of approaching the same model. You begin by selecting how much data you need similar to Verizon, though AT&T offers much more varied data limits, and as the amount of data you select increases, the cost of each smartphone drops. Consider the following table:
As you can see from the above table, smartphones can range from $30 to $45 per month, with the amount you pay decreasing the more data you need. AT&T is able to accomplish this by charging significant amounts of dough for relatively small amounts of data (seriously, $200 for 20GB?). In all, the pricing ends up being largely the same for two-smartphone households with AT&T and Verizon. With 4 GBs of data, AT&T's model yields a smartphone bill of $150, and the 10GB plan costs $180 under both carriers.
