AT&T Upgrade Fee Doubled

As if you needed yet another reason to hate AT&T, the company has gone and given you another reason anyway. The company, surprisingly enough, reported "blow-out" earnings recently while simultaneously instituting larger, more expensive data plans but thought, "why not slap our customers in the face a little harder?" and decided to double their customers' upgrade fees.

That's right, a leaked memo states that beginning today, February 12th, AT&T will double the original upgrade price of $18 to $36. If you're getting deja vu, don't worry because you're probably remembering the time Sprint did the same thing back in September. Sprint originally had upgrade prices of $18 as well and doubled it to $36.

However, all this was a rumor until Engadget reached out to AT&T who confirmed the horrible news via the following statement, "Wireless devices today are more sophisticated than ever before. And because of that, the costs associated with upgrading to a new device have increased and are reflected in our new upgrade fee. This fee isn't unique to AT&T and this is the first time we're changing it in nearly 10 years."

AT&T has never been my favorite carrier. I prefer to stick with Verizon and, especially now, I'm glad I do. I've heard a lot of problems from people I know that use AT&T, mainly with dropped calls and spotty service. I've heard good things about Sprint but I'm sure they ticked a lot of customers off by increasing their upgrade fees too. With the iPhone available on both Sprint and Verizon, AT&T is quickly losing leverage against theses other companies. If they want to retain customers, then they better stop raising prices.

Source: AT&T
Engadget - AT&T doubling its upgrade fee to $36 on February 12th (update: confirmed)

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