AT&T has announced new roaming data plans for the iPhone. There are two new plans and neither look cheap, except of course to the telco.

Summary from NYT: The first plan charges $120 per month for 100 megabytes of roaming data use. Or you can double that by paying $200 for 200 megabytes of international data usage. Expensive? Certainly. But cheap, according to AT&T because without the plan, a three-minute video would cost you $40 on roaming.

Where is the target market for such plans? Likely it would only appeal to frequent travellers who need to keep connected. But the trouble is, it would be an additional cost on top of what an iPhone user is already paying to stay connected. And AT&T iPhone plans aren’t cheap to begin with.

If this is a move to get users to use more data – newsflash to AT&T: it’s not working. In the age of unlimited data plans and the proliferation of Wi-Fi, such limiting and expensive plans won’t appeal to the masses. Not all iPhone users are jetsetting data addicts who, in lieu of a BlackBerry will depend on an iPhone for emails. But if they needed that functionality, why don’t heavy data users just get BlackBerries instead of the expensive JesusPhone instead?

The other niggles about the plan are a little disturbing. There’s no prorating so if you sign up to use it for a week while you’re overseas, AT&T will charge you for a whole month even if you cancel right after. If AT&T wants to keep its consumer base and sustain interest in the iPhone, maybe it should rethink its current strategy of attempting to hogtie or cripple its consumers with expensive data plans. The iPhone might be the status symbol of the moment, but there’s no guarantee someone else won’t come up with a phone to knock it out of the water.

Related:

Entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 9:28 am under News, iPhone.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
Stumble It!