Get Real AT&T

I've been with AT&T since Suncom was bought by Cingular was bought by BellSouth was bought by AT&T. I've been fortunate enough to live and travel in areas where their coverage has been good. I even had a good experience with my recent international travel.

Recently I have been hankering to be able to get on the Internet with tablets while in the car. There seem to be two alternatives. I could enable the hot spot capability on my Captivate or buy a MiFi device.

So today I stopped by the local AT&T (corporate) store and told the representative that I was interested in adding a tethering plan to my Captivate. He tried to sell me DSL! I got him back on track. I have a $25/month unlimited data plan and $5/month 200 text message plan for a total of $30/month. Obviously I want to protect the unlimited plan and the 200 text messages are fine as I mostly use Google Voice for texting.

He said that I'd have to go to a $45/month data plan with 4GB and a $20/month unlimited text message plan for a total of $65/month, an increase of $35/month and losing unlimited data.

I asked him about a MiFi-type device. He said AT&T has a Sierra Wireless AirCard 754S for $69.99 that requires a $50/month 5GB data plan.

For comparison I looked at C Spire. They have a Novatel MiFi 2200 free with a $19.99/month data plan with 1GB, $29.99/month with 2GB. I realize that the AT&T device is LTE and the C Spire device is EV-DO Rev. A and that the AT&T is plan is 5GB and the C Spire plan is 1GB but still...

Get real AT&T!