‘AT&T’ rhymes with ‘highway robbery’

Well, not really. I’m not a very good poet.

Yesterday, AT&T revealed that it will be eliminating one of its text messaging plans, taking away the $10-for-1,000 messages plan as an option for new customers (existing customers, including me, will be grandfathered into this plan). This leaves AT&T’s unlimited text messaging plan priced at $20 per month (or $30 for family plans) as the only option available to new customers starting August 21.

Even though this won’t have any immediate financial impact on me, this change chaps my hide for a few reasons.

• First, not everyone needs unlimited messaging. Though AT&T reasons that the “vast majority” of its customers “prefer unlimited plans,” I know plenty of people who don’t need one, including me and my husband and many family members. While we’re not going to be new subscribers to AT&T, of course, this change would force us to pay at least $20 more per month to AT&T than necessary if we had been given our current usage.
• Second, and most importantly in my eyes, text messages cost AT&T and other carriers next to nothing to transmit. This has been highlighted by the New York Times and in this blog post by Sam Garfield. (This has been the case for years, mind you, but is still very relevant given AT&T’s latest move.)

So, AT&T is going to make even more money off of new customers who might have opted for a less expensive texting plan for a service that costs them very little to begin with.

Does this sound reasonable to you? It certainly doesn’t to me.

Dan Moren at Macworld reasons that this may have something to do with the decline of text messaging as more and more people use smartphones with data plans along with 3rd-party messaging apps and email, making this a move to grab as much revenue as possible while text messaging use is still fairly high. Indeed, AT&T (and other carriers around the world) will likely see a dip in text messaging when iOS 5 is released and iMessage brings free messaging between every single iPhone, iPod touch and iPad user in the world. (And they probably already have because of cross-platform messaging apps like Kik, Whatsapp and others.) I know that iMessage will certainly cut down on my own text message use since the people I text the most have iPhones.

Once iOS 5 is released, I may see if I can do away with the $10 text messaging plan altogether and pay the à la carte price of $.20 per SMS (or $.30 per MMS) as needed since my closest friends and some family have iPhones, iPads, or iPod touches. AT&T can can take their highway robbery somewhere else.