If there’s one US carrier who’s taking connected cars seriously, it’s AT&T. By the end of the first quarter of 2016, the company’s network boasted over 8 million connected cars, and judging by latest developments, that number is going to keep increasing. AT&T has now officially launched its unlimited data plan for connected cars which it had just unveiled last week. The plan is currently only available to the existing users of AT&T’s smartphone unlimited data plan who can subscribe to it for $40 per month. If that’s out of your price range or you’re simply unwilling to pay, the company is now also offering a single gigabyte of data for 10 dollars a month.
Naturally, both the unlimited data plan and the one-gigabyte option are limited to a single car and in addition to already paying for an AT&T smartphone unlimited plan, the offer only applies to owners of cars with either an embedded Wi-Fi connection or the recently launched ZTE Mobley dongle. Of course, that’s still a decent chunk of people which is likely to continue rapidly increasing in the future. AT&T is currently putting a lot of hope into connected vehicles; the wireless carrier is currently equipping models of 19 different auto brands with internet connectivity and these two newest data options are just one of the many steps it’s planning to take in order to prepare for the world in which smart cars are the norm and not the exception.
It remains to be seen how popular this latest AT&T plan will be in the short-term, but one can already make an educated guess about its relative ceiling by the end of the next two quarters of 2016. As the US carrier revealed within its latest quarterly report, there are currently close to three million people who are paying for the aforementioned unlimited smartphone plan which has launched in January. Given how that user base likely doesn’t perfectly overlap with the 8 million large group of AT&T connected car owners, the wireless carrier is likely to look at any number of new customers larger than six figures as a rather positive result. Of course, provided that the said figure is attained by the end of June.