AT&T's hot new 5G plan destroys T-Mobile's best alternative... for a change
If you've been keeping an eye on the ever-changing US wireless industry for the last few months, you probably already know that T-Mobile has managed to disrupt the market several times since the beginning of this year alone with some very aggressively priced new plans and a truly unbeatable "free 5G phone upgrade" program.
But Magenta also generated a little bad press and customer dissatisfaction when it decided to seriously downgrade a competition-crushing high-speed data option unveiled just a few months prior to the divisive move, and coincidentally or not, said competition is now going after precisely that defunct plan.
Granted, AT&T is charging $55 a month instead of $50 for a whopping 100 gigs of data on its latest prepaid plan aimed specifically at tablets and mobile hotspots rather than good old fashioned smartphones, but that certainly beats T-Mo's current $50 for 50GB of 5G data offer.
Naturally, Ma Bell's top-of-the-line hotspot deal includes free "nationwide" 5G access, and you can secure this new price on both new and existing accounts with both AT&T Prepaid and Cricket Wireless. Possibly the best thing about all of this is that you don't have to lift a finger if you're already on the latter operator's 100GB data-only plan or the former's $75/40GB option to get a big discount and a big upgrade respectively starting with your next bill.
Unless you're absolutely sure you need just a fraction of that 100 gigs of "high-speed" data or absolutely want to spend less than 55 bucks a month, it's obviously hard to recommend AT&T Prepaid's 15GB Essential Data or Cricket's 20GB Simply Data options, both of which are priced at $35. If you think about it, that's not even dramatically less than $55.
Meanwhile, Verizon is basically not worth mentioning in the same breath as AT&T and T-Mobile when it comes to hotspot data-only plans, as highlighted in the chart above, which Magenta used to hype up its now-retired $50 for 100GB offer back in December 2020.
FCC OKs Cingular\'s purchase of AT&T Wireless
Things that are NOT allowed: