>I don’t know if you’ve seen the frantic blog headlines, but they boil down to this: Those big, greedy, monolithic cellphone companies have found yet another way to gouge us for more money.

Well, hold on a minute.

AT&T is a business. They don’t do stuff unless they think it’s gonna make them more money. End of story. They will give you a host of reasons but what it boils down to is the bottom line. They are a publicly traded company and they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to make money. Or the shareholders can sue them. That’s how capitalism works.

So, uh, yeah, they are trying to gouge you for more money. Not us, because I left them long ago due to their horrible (well, not so much horrible as non-existent) support for the technology their phones used (Oh, can’t plug that into your computer? Yeah, we don’t support that, sorry you spent the extra money for a phone that hooks up to your computer.)

T-Mobile caught me on the rebound and has served me well ever since. Long live Android and have fun paying the AT&T tax to use your shiny new iPhone 4. It almost multitasks but good thing it doesn’t really so you wont have to worry about it sneaking data down in the background.

UPDATE:

Well, I’m not too worried about the video-calling thing. You could videochat for 15 minutes every single day and still use up less than half of your DataPro allotment.

Oh, except you can’t because video chat doesn’t work on 3G, only WiFi. Currently anyway.

Another thing that grinds my gears on the whole thing is AT&T’s pricing scheme. $15 for 200 MB, $25 for 2GB. If you pass your initial 200, you pay $15 for another 200. That’s right, for 400MB you’ll pay what users are currently paying for unlimited. Sure, you can save yourself potentially $360 a year, but only if you stop using everything but the phone feature after you hit that 200, otherwise you’re just paying the same for crap. Currently, they claim, 98% of their users use less than 2 gigs a month. But if so few users are using ‘excessive’ bandwidth, why is their network so shitty and how will this pricing plan have those 2% of users paying for all that ‘excessive’ bandwidth that’s supposedly killing their network.

Why is their network so shitty that 2% of their users can kill it, and making those users pay an extra 5$ a month going to pay to upgrade their network?

It’s not. This is a play to extract extra money from those who are bad at math and just trying to save a couple bux up front, never realizing they’ll be paying 5$ more than the people getting 5x their bandwidth when they go over that measly 200 megs.