AT&T to increase grandfathered unlimited plans price to $35 from $30 on February 2016

AT&T customers who managed to hang onto their iPhone 3G era $30 unlimited data plans will experience their first price hike in seven years.

9 to 5 Mac reported that AT&T will increase its grandfathered unlimited plans to $35 from $30 by February 2016. There will also be much changes in the future, which probably will make customers uncomfortable. The talk and text costs will not be included in the data fee and the threshold will remain at 22GB speed before the slow-down is implemented.

AT&T announced that customers who doesn't like the price hike can end their contract 60 days before the implementation of the increase without paying for early termination fee.

Engadget wrote that AT&T isn't the only telecommunications giant that has increased its grandfathered unlimited data plans. T-Mobile also increased its unlimited data plans for new customers to $95 a month from $80. Meanwhile Sprint also had a price hike to $70 a month, and Verizon increased its unlimited data plan price by $20 per month.

AT&T and the other carriers have the same reason for the price increase, which is the expensive cost of delivering data to their subscribers, according to CNET. These companies have moved away from offering unlimited data for the last several years. They, instead make users buy buckets of data or offer plans for an amount of data at high speed that reduces rate when a threshold is reached.

AT&T has been trying to remove its unlimited data plans as it grandfathered most of its users after transitioning to shared data plans in 2010. The company even blocked Facetime from these plans unless the subscribers upgraded to limited plans, or prompting them to only 5GB of usage.

After FCC fines and facing lawsuits from FTC, AT&T has resolved to simply increase the prices on its unlimited data plans.

According to a study last year, 22 percent of Verizon users are still under the unlimited plans, while 44 percent of AT&T users has grandfathered unlimited plans, and Sprint and T-Mobile has 78 percent of users under the unlimited data plan.