You know you have a problem when you get excited about plan changes on your cellular provider. Yesterday, AT&T gave me a problem.

Initially, no more data overages, higher caps, and reduced pricing tiers looks like good news all around, but is that really true? After looking at the details of these new AT&T data plans I’m less than impressed. They’ve upped the per device access charge from $15 to $20.

Right now I have the $100 plan for 15GB, plus three devices, for a total of $145. Under the new plan, if I move to the similar the 16GB plan the base price is $90 but I’m now paying $60 in per device charges for a total of $150. (+$5)

Even going from the 15GB down to the new 10GB plan, would result in a savings of only $5, at the loss of 5GB of data.

Maybe.

It’s still really a bit confusing, the press release says “All Mobile Share Advantage plans also have an access charge of $10 — $40 a month per device not included in prices shown above.” but then later “customers will pay a $20 access charge per smartphone a month for Mobile Share Advantage.”

My hope/guess is that it’s likely to depend on which plan you pick, at least that’s how it is on the current setup. I believe the current $15 per device does jump to like $20 or $25 , on their current plans. So, if it continues to be a graduated scale, the new 16GB plan may actually be a money saver, but until their pricing calculator shows up when the new pricing is available on Sunday, we probably won’t know.

But from the “clear” statement, it looks like not a great deal. For now, they get a splashy headline. Verizon, who has a similar plan, has the separate fee for allowing “unlimited” reduced bandwidth, instead of charging an overage, and it seems like this increase is just a clever way of hiding that fee.

If I was really concerned about overages I’d probably just do it, but I never go over.