Internet Access Updates: Bandwidth Boosts and Price Cuts

A couple of snowy weekend heads-ups for you, on both the wired and wireless Internet access fronts. First off, mid-last September T-Mobile dropped the price on its ‘Total Internet Add-on’ package for cellular voice accounts from $29.99 to $19.99…but existing customers didn’t proactively receive the price cut. It took me until Friday, I must confess with no shortage of chagrin, to instigate the cost savings on my end, and as it turns out I didn’t even need to talk to a customer support representative on the phone.

By logging onto my T-Mobile account online, I was able to deselect the $29.99 plan option, then check the $19.99 alternative listed directly below it. Voila, I was up and running under the new deal with no service interruption (and amusingly, the $29.99 package is no longer offered as an online plan option on my account). Yesterday, I verified that my GPRS/EDGE cellular data service was fully functional, along with logging into a T-Mobile Wi-Fi HotSpot both from the phone and from my laptop. I had a minor scare when my initial HotSpot login attempts were unsuccessful, until I realized that T-Mobile had reset my password. And, as I confirmed just before crafting this particular post, Bluetooth-bonding my laptop to the phone-as-modem for Internet access over GPRS and EDGE still works, too.

T-Mobile’s data plan has, as far as I can tell, long been the best deal in the U.S. cellular market. This is the case in spite of the fact that the company has seemingly been slow to migrate to UMTS (which my phone doesn’t support anyway, so no biggie) as compared to its primary GSM competitor, AT&T. First off, there are no per-month cellular data usage limits with T-Mobile, either for Internet access directly from the phone or with the phone tethered to a computer. For a frequent web-surfer and recipient of large-payload emails such as myself, this perk alone is a big deal. Also, for $20/month, you get access not only to T-Mobile’s GSM data network but also the company’s nationwide network of Wi-Fi hotspots, both directly from the phone and from any computer. Granted, this may not be quite as big a deal five years from now, however it’s still easy for me to justify given how much I travel but still need to be regularly Net-connected.

The second deal involves AT&T’s DSL. Per an alert I saw on Monday morning, the company is raising prices on most of its service tiers by $5/month:

This price tag up-tick is somewhat offset by the fact that access to the company’s Wi-Fi network, previously an incremental $1.99 per month, is now bundled at no extra cost (and, unlike T-Mobile, AT&T proactively activated the Wi-Fi price cut on my account). Still, when I saw that I was able to lock into a higher DSL speed grade (Pro) at the same price (post-$5 increment) as the bandwidth tier I was currently receiving (Express), I jumped at the opportunity. Given my recent streamed and downloaded video experiences, I’d already been contemplating a bandwidth upgrade, and this offer sealed the deal.

I wasn’t able to find mention of the multi-month package on AT&T’s website, but an email to my PR contacts at the company stimulated a Tuesday afternoon phone call from a customer service representative (you’ll likely achieve similar success by calling AT&T’s customer support line). The company rep assured me that my higher service grade would be active by the end of the weekend. Yesterday afternoon, I received a commensurate automated phone call indicating that the upgrade was complete.

As a reminder, here’s roughly the grade of service I got under the old Express plan:

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