AT&T Rollover Data A Good Idea In Theory, Useless For Some Real Users

(Mike Mozart)

Tom is an AT&T customer, and currently has a data plan that includes rollover data. Normally, he and the other person on his plan are very precise: he says that they normally use 2.8 GB of their shared 3 GB plan. Recently, their normal practices didn’t work, and they had to dip into the rollover data. That’s when they learned that rollover data is only useful if your data use fluctuates wildly from month to month.

Certainly people with wildly fluctuating data use exist. Sometimes you’re on a trip and have to e-mail full-resolution photos or bored at the car repair place and want to watch Instagram videos. For example.

When you tend to use most of your data for the month, though, there isn’t much to roll over, and this happens.

“Our overage was 275 MB and we had 60 MB in rollover data,” Tom wrote to Consumerist. “In the attached screenshot, you can see that first they take the 60mb we had and applied it to our overage, so they’re now charging us for 143 MB of overage.”

If users paid by the megabyte, this wouldn’t be an issue, but they don’t. As you can see in the bill screenshot, the smallest quantity you can buy data in with this plan is 1 GB. It doesn’t matter whether you’re over by one megabyte or 999: you’re still going to be charged for the full gigabyte of data whether you consume it or not.

Of course, if they had stayed under 60 MB, then the rollover data would come in handy. They didn’t, and once a user goes over, it doesn’t make a difference by how much.

Rollover data is a great thing to advertise, but be sure to think critically about how things like this work in the real world, especially if you tend to run close to your data limit.

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist