AT&T Prepaid Appears to Have Pulled a Fast One
In our 46 and counting years in business we’ve seen many technological changes. Our engineering team has always prided itself on not only delivering the best technology to our customers but participating in many unpaid projects that move our world forward. Mobile data is a very big part of all of this. While working on an unrelated project we found that AT&T prepaid appears to have pulled a fast one with its new plans and phones.
Again, consumer electronics is not our focus as a company, but this really caught our attention when it became front and center on a project we’re working on.
Our work primarily has been in several industry sectors including aviation marketing. But probably not as well known is our work, for over the past 15 years, in the dating and relationship business. Here we’ve done lots of strategy marketing and planning with startups, some household names now. We’ve done websites, app development and plenty of SEO projects.
About a year ago a couple of our software engineers were asked to provide their expertise in studying several dating apps that appeared to be doing some shady things to consumers. As it turns out they were and are, big time. A bombshell report on all of this is about to go public, which appears to have triggered some investigations from authorities in several states.
But back to the AT&T story which has nothing to do with the dating app debacle.
As part of learning the operations of the algorithms used by the dating apps, we needed volunteer customers, some who had already complained on social media about all of this.
To have clean controlled dating app accounts we needed to use multiple cell phones. We decided on AT&T Prepaid as we could utilize the latest Android technology on high quality 5G phones.
The bulk of the tests were conducted using Samsung Galaxy A15 AT&T Prepaid phones.
The data plan was simple, up to 5 Gigs of high-speed data a month for $30. We used prepaid cards, so the phones were not tagged to any specific person. Mobile data speeds were area dependent, with several markets having typical data speeds of around 500 Mbps.
As the need for phones was ongoing, we then purchased a group of Samsung Galaxy A16 AT&T Prepaid phones. To our total surprise when we went to activate them, AT&T now had a new plan. The plan was now $35 a month for up to 30 Gigs of data but it was the furthest thing from high speed. It is throttled to not exceed 3 Mbps, yes for real. That is like some 3rd world nation stuff.
We then discovered that the A15s we were using reminded us every month that once we reached 6 months of on time payments we would “level up”. We soon realized that level up meant be forced into the new crazy slow plan. And the 6 months, that is how long you must own the phone before AT&T will unlock it as users would certainly want to get off that new plan and switch the phone to a different carrier.
And now the solution, as we did, make one of the payments late, even by just a day or two then the 6 month level up calendar resets. How many times will AT&T allow the resets, time till tell. And you can wait 5 months like we did. But they did launch one countermeasure, raising the rate from $30 to $33.
As we decided to write this article we looked all over to see if anyone else had figured this out. It appears some have but just pieces. So, here you have the whole story.
Oh, and the title of this article, even AI answer bots are calling it a fast one.
If you have any comments on this article, send us an email at hello@blueislanddigital.com or contact us.
And look out for the stories about that household name dating app when the report is released soon. We’re to understand several dating blogs are about to be all over it. Remember, you heard it here first.