AT&T’s Remaining Unlimited Data Customers Getting $5/Month Rate Hike In 2016

It’s been years since AT&T stopped offering new unlimited data plans, but a number of customers have held onto their grandfathered plans for years — even as the company throttled their access for actually trying to use the “unlimited” data that was promised. Come February, AT&T will raise the price on unlimited plans for the first time in years.

According to this page on ATT.com, the data portion of an unlimited subscriber’s AT&T bill will increase by $5, from $30/month to $35/month, beginning in Feb. 2016.

A rep for the company confirmed the plans and tells Consumerist that affected subscribers should be receiving notifications next month by e-mail (or in the mail if you’ve opted out of getting e-mails from the company).

AT&T’s increase comes on the heels of Verizon’s decision to raise rates on its few remaining unlimited customers. However, Verizon hit customers with a whopping $20/month price hike, bringing just the data portion of customers’ bills to $50/month.

Both AT&T and Verizon unlimited plans charge separately for text and talk, so it’s difficult to compare to unlimited offerings from T-Mobile and Sprint, which bundle in data/phone/text under one amount.

That said, T-Mobile also recently raised its rates for unlimited customers, from $80 to $95 (for single-line accounts; the pricing did not change for multi-line accounts).

Meanwhile, Sprint continues to offer two plans it dubs “unlimited.” There’s the $70/month plan that the company has had for quite some time, and a recently unveiled $20/month plan which — despite the “unlimited” name — only offers 1GB/month of high-speed data, leaving the subscriber to use Sprint’s much-slower 2G data network for the rest of the month.