[cwilliams706]

By NIRAJ SHETH

A senior AT&T Inc. executive dismissed speculation that the telecommunications carrier is planning to change the way it prices data plans for its wireless customers, but said it will give customers incentives to limit their use of its wireless network for surfing the Internet or downloading mobile applications.
"We have not made any decision to implement tiered pricing," AT&T Mobility Chief Executive Ralph de la Vega said Wednesday, referring to plans that would charge based on how much data a customer uses rather than the unlimited plans that are popular today.
The carrier is considering making more Wi-Fi hot spots free for its mobile customers, where they can access the Internet on a faster network than the cellphone network. It is also running trials of femtocells, boxes that use a home Internet connection and act as mini cellular towers. The purpose is to take significant amounts of traffic off of AT&T's wireless network, Mr. de la Vega said.
Mr. de la Vega declined to comment on the sorts of incentives the company will give customers to use less data. Many of its customers are on an unlimited usage plan.
AT&T has come under criticism from some customers who say the network is too congested and is inferior to competitors'. It has been struggling to keep up with the explosive growth in wireless data, which it says has expanded in volume by nearly 5,000% over the past three years.

[tzsm98]

On the GoPhone they have eliminated the unlimited data for $19.95 plan and have replaced it, in order to serve us better, with a 100 Megabyte plan for the same price. You can also get a 1 megabyte, oooh thats a bunch, for $4.95. This happened about 14 months ago.

For me the result has been a saving of money as I don't always use the 100 MB and it rolls over if I purchase an additional 1 MB before it expires. I purchase about three 100 MB blocks a year and nine 1 MB blocks now. I ran myself out of data one time and had to pay the one cent per kilobyte rate for about one web page. That was enough to get me back to feature packages to refill.

I call 611 more often to check my levels. I've changed how I use it since getting a T-Mobile 3G capable device and a T-Mobile 3G signal in Oklahoma City, most of my data use has been transferred to their unlimited plan, which I ding for 3 to 4 GB a month but I use the phone differently with T-Mobile. On AT&T it's used mostly to download the maps for my navigation and sometimes e-mail and to check out Reuters.com.

[tzsm98]

I was curious to see how my AT&T 3G stacked up against T-Mobile 3G.

This is the result I got for AT&T using a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (RM-428). At times the Connection Manager reported speeds in excess of 130 Kb/s while arriving at this figure. At other times Connection Manager reported 15 Kb/s. I'm not quite sure how to compare the Connection Manager numbers to the Speedtest numbers.


This is the result I received from T-Mobile using the Nokia N900 (RX-51). No Connection Manager information available.

This is another reason for me to drive more of my wireless data use to T-Mobile. I had suspected AT&T was a wee bit slower. Neither of these is burning a hole in the air between me and the tower.