AT&T on Tuesday announced that it will be introducing a longer Next 24 monthly installment program on November 9th alongside its Next 12 and Next 18 plans for financing an iPhone or other smartphone. AT&T customers on Next 24 will pay $0 down and make 30 equal monthly payments between $10 to $50 depending on the device purchased.
The new Next 24 plan offers the flexibility of lower monthly payments required over a longer period of time. After making 24 of the required 30 monthly payments, a customer gains the option to upgrade his or her iPhone upon trading in the financed device in good condition and activating a new smartphone on a new service agreement.
“When customers choose AT&T Next with AT&T’s Mobile Share Value plans, they can also receive a monthly discount on the access charge for that smartphone line,” reads AT&T’s press release. “When adding an AT&T Next line to a Mobile Share Value plan, customers can save $25 per month on that smartphone line’s access charge for plans 10GB or higher or $15 per month on plans less than 10GB.”
The new AT&T Next plans are as follows:
- Next 12: Divides cost of device into 20 monthly payments, upgrade eligibility after 12 months
- Next 18: Divides cost of device into 24 monthly payments, upgrade eligibility after 18 months
- Next 24: Divides cost of device into 30 monthly payments, upgrade eligibility after 24 months
AT&T Next 24 will be available to new and existing customers on November 9th.
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What is the difference between this and a normal plan? You still only get an upgrade after 24 months right?
basically a 2-year contract, just not exactly a “contract” since you just pay the phone off to get out of it.
Zero down vs 199 down and contract.
It allows you to choose one of the “Value” plans AT&T offers. You can upgrade early but you will have to pay off the balance owed on the phone before doing so.
Guys, we just switched to Sprint from AT&T. The family plan was, with the cost of the phone added to your bill $220 for four those four phones and you only got 10 gb of data.
On Sprint I am not getting 40 gb of data in our family plan and they are charging me $240 for these four brand new iPhone 6s and after two years $140 charges for the cost of the phones go away.
Yes Sprint is not as good as AT&T but they are much cheaper and have better lower cost packages than AT&T and Verizon.
Now AT&T needs to match the Verizon 2-line 10GIG plan for $110/mo
Sorry but as far as I am concern it’s a rip-off.
Tell you why.
In the old days we use to get a phone subsidized by a carrier and we would do a two year contract, it was fair. The carrier paid to have us as a customer and we were legally binding toward that carrier for two years
Now they want us to pay the whole cost of that phone which is $750 and still have a two year contract. So that is what this Next plan is all about, making payments toward the $750 cost of the phone. You are now paying the whole cost of this.
Sorry if they aren’t paying any of the cost of the phone, I am not doing a two year contract with any phone company, even if they are giving us a “interest-free” two year loan.
I hope that in the future that Apple and other phone manufactures makes these phone like the iPad and the way it is in Europe, all the same and you just have to switch out a sim chip in order to move from one company to another. Then we will see these carriers get off their rear-ends and justify their high costs. Having a phone company is a lot of up front costs, but once those are taken care of it’s big profits and I think that phone companies are rolling in big profits off of these data plans in which we are stuck paying for extra data time.
So I hope that every person that reads this realizes that it’s better just to pay off a phone at once, then you don’t have to do a long term contract with a carrier. Also I am afraid that we all have to be more careful with our phones, the days of switching to another phone every two years is gone now that we have to pay the high price ($750) for a phone.
I guess you missed the part where if you’re on AT&T Next your service plan is discounted by $25/month.
When on “Next” you are basically paying for the phone, just on an installment plan. You do not have a contract with them to keep your plan with them for two years but rather a contract to pay for that phone over the specified amount of time with no interest. For my family I am saving roughly $250 a year after including the cost of the phone on a two year upgrade cycle.
wait, AT&T requires you to trade in your old device when upgrading to the next one when on the Next program or did i misread above? i hadnt heard that before.
Its optional to trade in your old phone or you can choose to keep it. It is required for you to trade in your old phone if you decided to upgrade at the upgrade interval which would be either 12, 18, or 24 mo plan you choose. If you decide you’d rather keep your device you have to wait until you pay off the phone which would be 18, 24, or 30 mo. Basically you are on a 18,24, or 30 installment plan, but they allow you to upgrade 6 mo before you pay off your phone, in return you have to trade in your old phone. I think its better to just wait out the extra 6 months and pay off the phone because selling the phone yourself is worth more than $0 you would get for trading in your phone. They bank on that you will upgrade at your upgrade date so that they can turn around and sell your phone for a profit while you get attached to another installment plan.
“When adding an AT&T Next line to a Mobile Share Value plan, customers can save $25 per month on that smartphone line’s access charge for plans 10GB or higher or $15 per month on plans less than 10GB.”
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What the hell is an “access charge”? I’m assuming they just invented that to penalize people that don’t use the Next plan.
We know exactly what these AT&T charges are because we were a part of the family plan bait and switch. What they did when we got our family plan in the summer of 2013, they charged us $160 for four phones and 10 gb of data.
But the plan changed in February of this year, when they stopped subsidizing phones. Of course AT&T never came out and told us, but they billed us differently. They started charging $100 for the family plan data and each phone was $40 each. But what they did was gave us a $25 a phone credit for each phone, thus keeping the cost at $160.
But what they didn’t tell us and if you bought your phone elsewhere like we did in buying phones at Best Buy, when we bought two new iPhones in May and July, nobody told us until we saw the bill they took off that $25 a month credit. So instead of us getting what we thought were subsidized phones, we were paying an extra $25 a month forever. AT&T ripped us off by not telling us about this. Of course in talking with AT&T now they said that it was in the contract that they sent us, of course hidden in the 20 pages of stuff you have to read. So nobody from AT&T told us about these changes, they just happened.
In tracing this I found that if you bought your phone from a AT&T store they told you this. But for other places, including the Apple store they never warned you about this until September when the new iPhones came out and people started complaining to AT&T about this switch in your cost.
The bottom line is that it’s always cheaper to buy up front, you get a discounted price and you aren’t stuck with any contracts. With the landscape changing so much with bargains coming up every day, you don’t want to be bogged down with a 2 year contract.
We can only hope that now that American companies are no longer subsidizing phones, that we can do what they do in Europe and with the new iPads, have just one phone that is interchangeable my switching sim chips. When that happens these phone companies will have to do something else like bring back subsidize pricing or risk people going elsewhere at a moments notice.
The phone companies have gotten like every other company, very greedy now.
Actually, it’s not way cheaper to buy the phone up front. It is EXACTLY THE SAME PRICE if you use AT&T Next.
I don’t know. I think we need to innovate the industry a bit more. After all, Wallstreet Analysts like Maynard Humm, Jennifer Fritzsche and Benito Mussolini, Wall Street is happy as long as people prefer wireless services delivered with invisible airwaves over copper wires that go to your home.
Also, what AT&T doesn’t want you to know is that telephone service in African Jungle costs about US$5.00 per month.
So when your wondering why your paying $90 more per month than people in Africa, enjoy the ads on TV and say to yourself “When AT&T buys DirecTV for $40,000,000,000.00, I might sign up for that service too!”
I sell phones and I have to sit there and explain the differences between a two year and the ATT NEXT/ VERIZON EDGE Plans. I get people all the time that tell me no, no, no, but I tell them, Let me explain it, write out the different pricing, and explain the different programs. After 10 minutes of explanation, the customer automatically sees the difference in plan pricing.
Once thing I read in the comments, that is not true! When you go to upgrade and you have money left on your phone, you can either pay that amount thats left on your device and keep the phone, or trade it and upgrade to the new phone. Most of the time, customers will go with the 20 month installments and upgrade every year, because who doesn’t want a new phone every year?!?!