AT&T Cuts Back iPad Unlimited Data Plan

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Our man Andrew recently told you that AT&T (finally) introduced iPhone tethering in the United States. But, you have to exchange your unlimited data for 5GB a month. (As a BlackBerry user on AT&T, this is actually AT&T’s standard procedure). That’s not the only change that AT&T has made to their Apple products. The telcom is now changing the unlimited iPad data plan from Unlimited/$30 monthly to 2GB/$25 monthly.

Those of you who are currently on a month-to-month unlimited iPad data plan with AT&T, you probably shouldn’t cancel it, as AT&T will continue honoring the unlimited/$30 agreement as long as you continue the contract (which is certainly one way to get people to honor the agreement). If you’re on unlimited/$30 with AT&T and 2GB/$25 seems like a better deal, AT&T will let you opt into the new rate, although I don’t know why you would. It’s worth noting that the low-end 250MB/$15 deal is unchanged.

It’s worth noting that AT&T is doing this a bit differently than some European carriers. Movistar in Spain will just throttle your 3G speeds down to 128kbs if you go over your monthly iPad 3G bandwidth. If you use your monthly bandwidth (250MB or 2GB), then you are charged for another month, and your 30 days restarts. This is actually preferable to receiving a $5,000 phone bill in the mail, I’d imagine.

So, are unlimited data plans dead? We’ve seen carriers moving slowly away from it. Their networks unfortunately weren’t built for all this heavy web usage, and it looks like we’re going to get charged by the byte from here on out.