On Monday, June 7th, AT&T will introduce two new smartphone data plans, which will replace the current $30/month unlimited data plan offer and will make smartphone data packages affordable to more customers. The DataPlus package does, indeed, lower the entry-level price for smartphone users. The DataPlus package costs $15 per month for 200 megabytes of data, with the option of purchasing an additional 200 megabytes of data for $15. Customers who are heavy data users can purchase the DataPro plan, which is a 2-gigabyte package for $25 per month. If customers go over this limit, an additional gigabyte of data costs $10. DataPro customers can also use their mobile devices as wireless modems to connect other devices (e.g., laptops) to the network for an additional $20 per month.   

The net-net of these new packages is that customers using the DataPlus plan get a voice and data plan for $55 per month and customers on the DataPro plan pay $65 per month, compared with the current price of $70 per month. These price cuts will benefit the increasing number of employees who are responsible for paying for their own voice and data plans. Results from Forrester’s 2010 Enterprise And SMB Networks And Telecommunications Survey show that approximately 30% of over 1,000 surveyed enterprises have already cut the number of employees who qualify for corporate-liable mobile data and voice services, and 17% plan to cut the number of employees on corporate-liable voice and data services this year.     

These new plans are also a bold move by AT&T. The plans will help AT&T control the huge amount of data carried over its mobile network due to the increased use of mobile applications driven by iPhone and iPad customers. In addition, the new iPhone running on the iPhone OS 4 operating system is expected to be released this week. These new data plans will help AT&T manage the heavy data consumption over its network and improve overall network performance.