Does AT&T charge for hotspot?
There is also a fee for the use of the mobile wifi hotspot option that is provided by AT&T in case you intend to use your phone or any other device as a modem. The AT&T Internet has many different hotspot data plans that are available, so I do have some choices in the matter. However, subscribing to the facility of using your phone as a modem is considered another data plan that is provided at an added cost, over your normal phone call bill.
The current least expensive mobile data plan from AT&T that includes hotspot data usage is $10 additional per month and offers 5GB of hotspot use. If you exceed 5GB in a given month, then you will be charged an additional $10 per each extra 1GB utilized.
It is also possible to have a 10GB hotspot plan at $20 extra and a 15GB at $30 extra per month. The $30 per month plan offers a hotspot data feature that allows the user to roll over the data to the next month if he or she didn’t use this data.
It also has the next plan called the Unlimited Data for your Family where you are allowed to make use of your device as a hotspot. However, this is one of the most expensive plans that AT&T offers for a shared family plan going for $180 for four lines. However, if you have more than one data user in the house, it can work out cheaper than paying for individual limited data contracts and hotspot options for the whole household.
Remember that most of AT&T’s unlimited data plans have throttled the mobile hotspot to a certain amount of Gigabytes. If you are a subscriber of the Unlimited Elite plan, then, for the first 40GB of your hotspot data usage per month, you will get full 4G speeds, after which the speeds drop to a maximum of 128 Kbps until your next bill cycle. Therefore when it comes to the unlimited subscription it refers to the data volume and not the 4G LTE speed for hotspots.
Some things to know about AT&T's hotspot data plans
-Please note that usage of hotspots is also taken from your monthly phone data allowance. Well if you have a 10GB phone plan, you use 5GB for hotspot you have 5GB of phone usage left.
- Connecting your phone to a Hotspot also reduces battery life, so be sure to where a charger is nearby, or reduce the brightness of the screen.
- To make other wifi enabled devices such as Laptops, tablets, and other gadgets online using your phone’s mobile data while in wifi hotspot mode, connect them to your phone’s wifi network. The majority of phones can accommodate between 5 and 10 devices on the hotspot feature.
- Hotspot speeds are not as fast as home broadband Wi-Fi; it ranges between 10-25 Mpbs for downloads depending on the strength of the signal received on AT&T’s network. But it is fast enough for email, watching movies and videos on the web, listening to music, and most other office-related activities.
- You need to monitor the consumption of hotspot data in your account every month to avoid spending more than you anticipated by accessing your MyATT portal or the AT&T app.
In conclusion, therefore, it is true that AT&T does allow and charges extra monthly fees for making and using your handset as a mobile hotspot to connect other gadgets to the internet. This is considered a luxury internet service which comes with an additional cost on revenue over standard mobile data and costs. However, they do provide somewhat limited tiered hotspot data options and there are also unlimited data plans if you are willing to spend more. This represents the importance of being very cautious about the extent of hotspot usage or the risk of incurring additional charges that can cause costs to balloon.
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