Today, AT&T announced that they were going to change their data plans for their smartphones on June 7th (WWDC date, yes I know) on it's network. Even though this change will benefit most of it's users, it will hurt the others. So here is the breakdown of what has happened.

The current $30 a month for unlimited data is going to be replaced by 2 data plans which are called DataPlus and DataPro. The DataPlus plan is $15 a month for 200Mb of Data and the DataPro plan is $25 for 2Gb of data. Now before you go screaming and shouting saying that you need unlimited data to AT&T, go look at your data usage on the AT&T website, as they are saying that 98% of it's users use less than 2Gb which is a plus for all those customers as they pay $5 a month less. Also you can keep your unlimited plan if you want to but you can change without extending the contract.

Now, these new data plans could arguably be a game changer as well as being very simple. You pay for the $15 plan and $15 for each additional 200Mb. However, if you are on the $25 plan you pay $10 for each Gb you go over.

Tethering has been also announced in these new data plan update. Tethering will be only available on the DataPro and for another $20 a month, which makes the total bill $45 a month. However, you do not get any additional data for tethering so you have to share the data between your phone and the tethering. This is really good if you are a light user but not so good if you use a lot of data. Unfortunately, you do need to move away from the unlimited data plan for it to work. And yes the iPhone will get tethering whenever iPhone OS 4.0 gets released later this summer.

The iPad data is also going to change to these new data plans. The dubbed "truly unlimited" $30 data plan is going to be replaced by the DataPro plan with 2Gb of data.

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