What Can You Do Within AT&T's Rate Plans?

Last week AT&T announced changes to their rate plans that replaces their unlimited plans with two tiers, the DataPlus Plan that costs $15 per month for 200 MB and the DataPlus Pro Plan that costs $25 per month for 2 GB. If you exceed the original plans, DataPlus subscribers will be automatically charged $15 for an additional 200 MB and DataPlus Pro subscribers will pay $10 for an additional 1 GB.

It can be difficult to translate what exactly the rate plans mean to you, but I found a good web page at clicker.com that provides some examples. AT&T provides examples that include the numbers of e-mail and web pages you can view, but perhaps the most telling is the number of minutes of video that you can watch.

Clicker.com ran tests of various apps on the iPad and came up with the following for those who subscribe to the 2GB per month plan:

- You can watch about 17 hours of YouTube videos per month, assuming that you do nothing else with your iPad but watch videos.

- You can watch about 13.65 hours of Netflix videos per month.

- You can watch about 10.24 hours of programming on the ABC.com streaming app.

The different viewing times is due to the quality of the video available for the applications that were tested. The bottom line is that because there will now be limits on the amount of data that you pay for, you will have to pay attention to what you use, and according to the New York Times that has app vendors worried that people will chose to not use their apps rather than manage their data.

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