AT&T Brings Back Rollover — but This Time, It’s All About Data
The mobile-data wars are heating up, now that wireless carrier AT&T has announced it will offer rollover data service to its Mobile Share Value customers.
Starting Jan. 25, all new and current AT&T Mobile Share Value customers will receive the company’s Rollover Data feature at no additional cost, the carrier announced Wednesday. The feature allows for any unused data a customer has paid for during the month to roll over to the next. For instance, if a family pays for four lines and 15 GB of monthly data and uses 12 GB, the 3 GB of unused data will be added to the next month’s services, providing 18 GB of data at no additional charge. All the data is shareable, meaning all lines can use the additional storage.
However, the deal will not go on forever. According to AT&T, “unused data expires after one billing period or with any plan change.” In other words, if the unused data is still not used during the rollover month, it goes away with the next billing period.
AT&T’s announcement comes on the heels of T-Mobile announcing last month that it would start offering data rollover in January. That feature, which the carrier calls Data Stash, allows for any customer with plans featuring 3 GB of monthly data or more to roll over unused data to the next month. In addition, new and existing customers get an initial 10 GB of free data for the “stash” to kick things off.
“If you buy data, it’s yours,” T-Mobile CEO John Legere said on a webcast after the announcement last month.
“Rollover” was a key component in AT&T’s success earlier in the 21st century. The company provided customers the ability to take any unused minutes and add them atop their next month’s plans to limit chances of incurring overage charges. While AT&T eventually abandoned the service when the industry turned to unlimited talk time as data became the new expensive component in wireless plans, it has now come back.
Interestingly, Legere said last month that T-Mobile calls its service Data Stash because AT&T owns the rights to use the term “rollover.”
Speaking of Legere, the outspoken T-Mobile chief executive took to Twitter on Wednesday to taunt AT&T, saying that it’s “only day 7 of 2015 and my predictions are coming true.” Legere previously said that T-Mobile was breaking ground by offering its Data Stash, and the company expected competitors to follow its lead. However, an AT&T spokesman told CNET in an emailed statement that his company “always planned to announce this at the Consumer Electronics Show to start the year with a great new benefit for our customers.” That was corroborated by Jackdaw Research chief analyst Jan Dawson in a statement to CNET.
“AT&T’s announcement will be seen as a response to T-Mobile’s Data Stash announcement from just before Christmas, but in reality it has been in the works and under discussion at AT&T for quite some time,” Dawson said. “Given that AT&T pioneered the concept of Rollover Minutes, it’s natural that it would want to own the concept and the brand in the data world too.”
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