AT&T Mobile Share Advantage mimics T-Mobile, dropping overages in favor of throttling

With AT&T’s Mobile Share Advantage, the telecom giant follows a new trend: Customers who switch to this new shared mobile plan (available August 21) will be spared bandwidth overage fees. Instead, the firm said, after available bandwidth is used up, its Mobile Share Advantage customers will be throttled to 128Kbps for the rest of the current billing cycle.

The Mobile Share plans pool bandwith among devices that can include smartphones, feature phones, tablets, gaming devices, wearables, laptops, hotspots, and other hardware. A monthly charge per device is paired with a charge for a tier of bandwidth. 

Why this matters: AT&T joins T-Mobile and Sprint among the big four U.S. carriers in shifting to throttling instead of causing customers to rack up fees at $10 per gigabyte above plan totals. That’s good news for consumers, though it’ll be interesting to see whether they’ll tolerate throttling or break down and buy more bandwidth, sending more money to the carriers after all.

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