New AT&T iPhone Early Termination Fees Bumped to $325 from $175

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We have unpleasant news for all AT&T current and potential iPhone customers. Starting with June 1 new AT&T iPhone customers will have to pay a bigger early termination fee in case they’ll want to ditch AT&T for a different carrier. And by a little I mean almost double as the ETF for iPhone customers is moving from $175 all the way up to $325.

Is this how AT&T is making sure that future iPhone 4G customers will stick to AT&T for longer period of times? Does this new ETF tell us that AT&T is actually trying to prevent customers from leaving the network in order to move to, say, a Verizon iPhone when the device hits the stores?

Or is AT&T simply following the footsteps of Verizon, another carrier that introduced a larger ETF just around the Motorola Droid launch?

Besides current and future iPhone models, all future smartphones will have the same $325 ETF. In case you will opt for a featurephone instead of a smartphone the ETF drops to $150 but that’s really not something we’re that interested in.

It will be important to see what the FCC will make of this. The Commission investigated Verizon’s early termination fees right after Big Red introduced the new “advanced devices” policy but it failed to convince the carrier to drop those high ETFs.

Should we understand that Sprint will also introduce such a new ETF once the EVO 4G hits stores? After all, we’ve seen T-Mobile and Google also exaggerate ETFs for the Google Nexus One with each company adding their own fee so Sprint is the only one left to upset customers with new early termination fees.

What’s even more ironic here is that AT&T has decided to bump up ETFs despite all the iPhone-related complaints it received over the last three years concerning the poor performance of its network. Is AT&T expecting a massive flood of consumers to leave soon?