AT&T's new family plan: two lines sharing 10GB for $130 a month, $15 per additional line
AT&T Sweetens Offer for Family Plans — AT&T, the second largest American phone carrier, on Saturday said it would offer a cheaper phone plan for families with multiple devices.
Context & Ripple Effects
AT&T is sharpening a family-plan push it began two months ago with its Mobile Share Value Plans, which cut monthly costs for BYOD customers, and this new two-line/10GB bundle at $130 with $15 per extra line extends that shared-bucket structure further down the price curve. It also lands weeks after AT&T offered up to $450 in credits to poach T-Mobile customers and ejected T-Mobile CEO John Legere from its CES party — a sign of how hot the carrier fight for multi-line households has become.
The shared-data template is not AT&T's invention: Verizon set the pattern with its Share Everything plans in June 2012, and the wide same-day pickup across Reuters, Engadget, PC Magazine, MacRumors and others shows how closely the market now tracks each move in family pricing. The arc runs back through AT&T's 2008 $99 unlimited plan and its 2012 retreat into tiered buckets (300MB/$20 to 5GB/$50), so today's announcement is another step in the industry's pivot from unlimited to pooled data as the family battleground.
First-order effects
- Families with multiple devices get a direct price cut from the second-largest US carrier: two lines sharing 10GB for $130 a month, with each additional line adding just $15 — a structure that rewards households for concentrating more devices on one AT&T account.
- The offer puts immediate pressure on Verizon's Share Everything lineup, which pioneered shared data for up to 10 devices in June 2012, forcing a like-for-like comparison at the two-line level where AT&T has just moved first.
Second-order effects
- T-Mobile and Sprint, already targets of AT&T's January switcher credits, face renewed pressure to answer on family pricing or cede the multi-line segment that anchors carrier churn math.
- Cheaper per-line add-ons strengthen the BYOD economics AT&T introduced with Mobile Share Value in December 2013, pushing device subsidies further out of the pricing equation and shifting carrier margin toward the data bucket itself.
Third-order effects
- If every major carrier keeps repricing around pooled buckets, the family plan becomes the industry's primary competitive unit — replacing the unlimited plans of AT&T's 2008 era and turning per-line fees and bucket size into the levers regulators and consumers scrutinize most.
- A sustained multi-line price war would accelerate consolidation of household accounts onto one carrier per family, raising the switching cost of leaving any carrier and hardening the big-three structure against smaller players.
The trend: US carriers are converting family plans from per-device pricing into shared data buckets, making multi-line households the main front in the post-unlimited wireless price war.