On the other hand, up yours, AT&T

I know I recently praised the pricing of AT&T’s family plan, and I stand by that.

However, when I actually signed up for the plan, I received a long and somewhat complicated .pdf document detailing my new phone contract; after staring at this for a while I understood that it was indicating a a much higher price.  Twenty minutes of online customer support chat alter, I was able to figure out that, rather than renewing my plan as I’d asked for, AT&T had upped me to a plan with more minutes that cost $30 more a month.

I also use AT&T for my home phone and internet service.  (I used to use them for cable TV, too, before I dropped cable for Netflix like all right-thinking people!)  Same story when I signed up for that:  the promised bundle discount wasn’t on my first bill, but after a long conversation with customer support they fixed it.  Until the second bill, when the discount had disappeared again, requiring another long conversation with customer support.  That time it finally stuck.

It’s depressing that from a pure profit standpoint this is probably pretty good business practice: overcharge everyone, and count on the fact that lots of people don’t have the time or cultural capital to both recognize the overcharge and successfully reverse it.

Most tech writers are single but most phone buyers aren’t

Matthew Yglesias, in Slate, says you’d have to be nuts to buy a phone on a contract:

If you buy a subsidized iPhone 5 from AT&T, the cheapest plan available costs $85 per month and only comes with 1 GB of data, a minimum of $2,040 over the two years of the contract. A basic T-Mobile unlimited voice plan with 2 GB of data costs $59.99 per month, $1,440 over the two years. In order to get that $450 iPhone discount, you would end up paying $600 more to AT&T over the life of the contract, and get less data….

Of course, customers have to actually recognize that the new deal is better. The subsidy model is basically a scam, but it only arose thanks to our own collective mental failings

All this is true — if you’re buying a single phone.

Otherwise, it’s wrong.

On the basic AT&T family plan with two lines, you get your $450 subsidy on both phones, and you pay $40 for voice plus $45 per phone; so $130 a month in all.  On T-Mobile, with no annual contract, you’re paying $120 per month for your two phones; the $240 in bills you save over the life of the 2-year contract doesn’t come close to making up the money you lose by forgoing the $900 phone subsidy.  AT&T has LTE coverage in major cities already, and Verizon has even more; T-Mobile doesn’t even start building LTE until next year.  Now the T-Mobile family will have 2GB of data each, but the AT&T family will have only 1GB to share.  1GB is fine for me and my wife (I’ve never used more than 300MB in a single month) but if you want more, you can get 4GB shared between the two phones for $150 a month.  You’re still coming out ahead on money, plus you can share your 4GB of data however you like instead of splitting it 2 and 2, and you’re on a faster network.  By the way, if you want tethering on T-Mobile, you’ll have to pay extra:  on AT&T’s contract, it comes with.

The details of the AT&T family plan aren’t really the point — the point is that people who write about tech are largely drawn from the universe of young single people.  What applies to them does not apply to everyone!

 

Gehry/Serra

Back from a very brief trip to Princeton. The much-maligned new science library, built by Frank Gehry, is now up. I like it — it’s very much like the Stata Center, but more humble. Here’s a small piece of it viewed from inside the Richard Serra sculpture “Fox and Hedgehog,” also much-maligned, and which I also like.

Note: this is my first attempt to blog by iPhone. I’m sitting in my car, in the back of which CJ has dozed off, and I thought I’d let him sleep instead of continuing immediately with the shopping as planned.