AT&T Offers Family Plan For Net Access

from the hello,-arbitrage... dept

Now that AT&T has ditched their cable internet access business, they're pushing forward with their DSL and dialup offerings, including this odd new family plan for dialup. For $24 a month, you actually get three accounts. One for yourself, and two others you can give to whoever the hell you want. It sounds like three fully functional accounts, all of which can be used at the same time. In other words, why would anyone ever buy an AT&T Worldnet dialup account, without sharing it with two other people? Realistically, the price of an account has just dropped bo $8/month from AT&T as long as you can find others to share it with you. I'd expect to see Craigslist postings from people looking to find others to share with them. Or, even better, this represents an arbitrage opportunity. Sign up for a $24/month account for yourself, and then sell the other two accounts at $15 a piece. They're still paying noticeably less than an AOL or Earthlink dialup account, and you're making $6/month (while still having a dialup).
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  • identicon
    Oliver Wendell Jones, 14 Jan 2003 @ 6:44am

    $6 per month?

    If you re-sell your two accounts, I'd be willing to bet money that those people can't call up AT&T and get tech support unless they pretend to be you. So unless you want to provide internet tech support to two people for free (or $6/mo which is the same thing) I wouldn't recommend this...

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 14 Jan 2003 @ 10:45am

    Craigslist? Hello? SF Bay isn't center of the univ

    Uh, hello, but not everyone who comes to this site is from the SF Bay area, so there are most likely a lot of people who have no friggin clue what Craigslist is! Try to be a little less geocentric, man!

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Mike (profile), 14 Jan 2003 @ 11:28am

      Re: Craigslist? Hello? SF Bay isn't center of the

      At last check, Craigslist was available in 17 cities around the US. Besides, plenty of people outside of those areas do know what Craigslist is.

      Either way, though, you should really chill out. It was just an example, and had nothing to do with the point of the story.

      link to this | view in chronology ]


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