AT&T’s Chief Executive stirred up the masses at the D9 conference this week by announcing that they are working on developing shared data plans that would allow users to combine minutes and data plans between their devices.
No indication was made as to exactly when this might happen (or how much such plans might cost), but the idea conveyed was definitely that paying a single monthly fee would net you a unified pool of minutes and data to use between a number of devices.
At the Reuters Global Technology Summit last month, Fran Shammo, Verizon’s chief financial officer, revealed that shared data plans were inevitable:
We had individual minutes for individual users. Then we eventually got to what we call family share where everyone in the family shares the same minutes. I think it’s safe to assume that at some point you are going to have mega-plans (for data) and people are going to share that mega-plan based on the number of devices within their family. That’s just a logical progression.
So, there you go – you’ll certainly get shared data plans in the U.S., but when they’ll come is a mystery right now.