AT&T and Verizon Raising Prices in Response to Inflation
Bloomberg reports that both AT&T and Verizon are raising prices in response to inflation. AT&T is jacking up prices on legacy plans by up to $6 per month on single lines and up to $12 per month on family lines. In June, Verizon will start charging for euphemisms, adding $1.35 per month for “administrative charges” for personal lines, with business lines seeing an additional “economic adjustment charge” of $0.98 to $2.20 per month.
While Verizon’s price increase applies to all plans, old and new, AT&T has focused its price increase solely on legacy plans in an effort to get grandfathered users to switch to its current unlimited plans. Regardless of the price hike, it’s often worthwhile to investigate newer plans as a way of saving money.
It remains to be seen if T-Mobile will join AT&T and Verizon in raising prices or if the brasher cellular company will double down on its often-lower pricing to lure AT&T and Verizon customers perturbed by their larger bills.
Inflation is certainly a real thing at the moment.
Here in the UK we have a prices index called RPI (Retail Price Index), and because of the issues of both Covid and Ukraine, the RPI was a whopping 8.9%.
So that’s precisely what several of my companies use to set their annual price increases on contracts. Thus for example my carrier here (O2) duly increased monthly bills by that amount (8.9%).
For comparison, a typical year is between 2.5% to 4% increase – so inflation is roughly over 2 to 3.5 times a ‘normal’ year’s increase!
…I could also talk about energy prices literally doubling yr-o-yr… but then I’d cry.
Hopefully we’ll see some relief over the next 12 months on that one.
My wife and I are on the ATT network via Consumer Cellular. No word so far about a price increase.
We experienced a slight increase when CC was sold to the private equity firm GTCR in the fall of 2020. The next year CC dropped its 250 minute plan and so our monthly cost went up by $5 for those months when we went over our allotted minutes. In such cases CC automatically upgrades the customer to the next tier with no associated fees. You can downgrade the plan on the CC website and it takes effect the next billing cycle.
On the other hand, they doubled our shared data to 1GB at no extra charge!
We currently pay $40+ taxes for unlimited talk/text and the cheapest data plan. There are a few less expensive plans out there but the difference is minimal. . . CC has such good customer support and the no-contract no-fees plan flexibility so we see no reason to change carriers.
We upgraded both of our 2 year old iPhone 6S ($200 new from CC) to the SE3 purchased from Apple. We are very happy that we did not pay $300+ more for an iPhone 13. The SE3 works great and we appreciate the smaller size. We don’t miss any of the features on the more expensive iPhones.
We can easily afford more but we don’t need more anything. If the talk/data plans meet your needs Consumer Cellular can be much cheaper than the large carriers. Other folks are better off looking elsewhere. . .