AT&T Increases Prices on Retired Hotspot Plans (Including Unlimited Plus) and Unlimited Elite Smartphone Plan

AT&T recently sent out notifications to customers on some legacy retired plans that they will see a price increase starting with their August bill.

For both increases, only plans started before August 1, 2022 will be affected. These changes are for consumer lines of service.

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Hotspot Lines on Unlimited Plus, Choice, and Choice II Plans

Customers on retired Unlimited Plus, Choice, and Choice II wireless plans with mobile hotspot lines will see an increase of $10/month.

This change will apply to hotspot lines with hotspot devices/routers, AT&T Wireless Internet (AWI) devices, and laptops. Wearables, tablets, and phones on these plans will not receive any increase.

Unlimited Plus was available for smartphones and other devices from February 2017 until February 2018 and was a very popular plan for RVers and boaters. The best feature was the ability to add an unlimited hotspot line to multi-line plans for just $20/month, or was available standalone for $95/month. The plans were truly unlimited hotspot data, just subject to network management after 22GB of usage a month - and included unlimited full speed roaming into Canada & Mexico. 

When it was announced that this plan was retiring and AT&T extended the ability to add hotspot lines to existing plans until May 2018, we encouraged those who could to sign up for this plan while they could, as $20/month for an unlimited hotspot plan is an incredible deal. 

Since AT&T retired Unlimited Plus, they have only offered capped data plans for hotspots and routers. 

It is worth noting that these legacy unlimited plus hotspot lines are still only eligible to receive 4G LTE - they have not been provisioned for 5G. 

Unlimited Elite Plans

Customer on retired Unlimited Elite smartphone plans will see an increase of $2.50/line/month. Only plans with smartphone lines will be affected - wearables, tablets, and non-phone devices will not get the increase. 

The Unlimited Elite plan was retired in June 2022 and was $85/month for a single line of service. It included unlimited priority on-device data, 40GB of high speed mobile hotspot data, 4K video streaming, Canada/Mexico use and HBO Max (now called Max).

The currently available top-tier phone from AT&T is Unlimited Premium. It's similar to Unlimited Elite in that it's also $85/month for a single line, includes unlimited priority on-device data, 4K video streaming, and Canada/Mexico use.

But it has more hotspot data - 50GB instead of 40GB - and does NOT include Max.

Summary

AT&T made a $20/mo increases on business Unlimited Plus hotspot lines in 2019, and we speculated back then that consumer lines might be next. That it took them over 4 years to have only a $10/mo price increase on the consumer equivalent is actually quite generous. 

For customers still hanging on to Unlimited Plus hotspot lines - a price increase to $30/mo for add-on lines is still a fantastic value for unlimited LTE data. However, to keep that pricing customers have to continue to keep their associated Unlimited Plus smartphone lines, which don't match up to current offerings. 

For Unlimited Elite customers, unless holding onto the Max perk is important to you, it might be worthwhile to consider changing to Unlimited Premium to get the extra hotspot data.

At this point, we have seen no indication of any planned similar price increases for Mobley / Connected Car lines - which were also offered in the same time period for $20/month for unlimited hotspot data. 

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