I feel bad for everyone that's jumping ship to sign up for the "double mobile share" from their grandfathered unlimited. When it comes time to get a new phone they are going to be pissed and AT&T will cash in and get them to finance it through their "Next" plan. So their bill will be significantly more than what they had. I don't see many of these people paying $1000 for a new iPhone....
Members of my family plan are not up to upgrading our phones again anytime soon. We all have the Note 2's, iPhone 5's, and S3's from two years ago in 2012, and we will all be off contract by November 2014.
Our previous upgrade before 2012 was when we all picked up the iPhone 3's back in 2008 that gave us the UDP. Looking back, we ended up subsidizing the iPhone 3's over four years, instead of two, because we all skipped the iPhone 3s, 4, and 4s.
We dropped our UDP for the MSV plan, because ...
1. We are all willing to wait for "the next big thing" until around 2016.
2. Our peak combined data usage has never gone over 20GB in one month since 2008.
3. Our combined monthly data usage average since 2012 is around 15GB, and dropping.
4. Our cellular data usage is dropping because we seem to have wifi available at more places than before, such as work, school, hotels, stores, malls, and restaurants. We also have Xfinity internet at home, so we can connect to xfinitywifi when available elsewhere, and not just attwifi.
5. We can now use the personal hotspots on all five lines for our wifi only tablets and laptops, when local wifi is not available.
6. We feel that the shared data plans will just get cheaper and\or have larger pools of data for the same price due to market pressure between the carriers.
7. We feel that there will be at least one or more carriers that will be offering UDP's if we ever would want it again, or just to "feel good" and say that we have UDP again.
8. We just recently started receiving a small FAN discount, so our monthly payment with taxes and fees went from $340 to $297 with the FAN discount, and it is now at $220 with the MSV plan.
We will no longer be "subsidizing" our out of contract phones over the next two years, and will be saving a total of $120 a month going forward. We will have saved $2,880 over the next two years to help pay for the next big things, the cheaper previous big things, hand me down big things, used big things, or refurbished big things around 2016. In the meantime, we will enjoy the convenience of tethering as needed and up to 40GB unthrottled.