The world changed when smartphones became the standard must have piece of technology to live everyday. Though modern society has been quick to adopt the new technology, ironically the wireless carriers that supply the smartphone with data and voice services have been slow to adjust. Until just recently wireless carriers still made customers lock down their allegiance and wallets with long term contracts that usually lasted 2 years. On top of that, the plans offered woefully inadequate data plans which would inevitably mean people would go over and get charged obscene overage charges.

New cheaper alternative wireless carriers like Metro PCS and Cricket emerged to take on those customers that would trade better plans for brand loyalty. The big boys that control the market fought back with more competitive data plans. Almost all major carriers offered some type of unlimited data plan at some point, though carriers like Verizon have since stopped offering those plans. T-Mobile changed the game when they were the first major carrier to do away with those long term commitment wireless plans. Now all major carriers either have switched to a monthly pay as you go type phone plan or plan to convert in the near future.

It looks like AT&T is the next major carrier to change the smartphone owning experience. Despite the fact that the insanely long term phone plan is now becoming obsolete, for the vast majority of people they still have data limits. Meaning, if they go over their allotted data in any given month, there will still be heavy penalties. AT&T plans on introducing a new phone plan that gets rid of overage fees. Instead, when someone surpasses their normal allotment of data, their data slows down to an estimated 128kbps. For those that don’t know, that’s far slower than average data speeds and for many it can feel like crawl speed.

This change comes in response to biggest rival Verizon also introducing a plan called “safety mode” that also eliminates overage fees by reducing data speeds past the allotted limit. “In a competitive market, Verizon and AT&T cannot afford to ignore each other,” Recon Analytics analyst Roger Entner said. “If one does something, the other one has to follow suit.” AT&T also overhauls some existing data plans. Their popular large data bucket plans are becoming cheaper.