AT&T on Wednesday announced that data will soon be rolled over to the next month for 50 million of its Mobile Share Value subscribers.
The rollovers will occur automatically as of Jan. 25 and will benefit an entire family or business across all smartphones and devices on the same Mobile Share Value plan.
The move comes less than a month after T-Mobile announced a rollover data plan called Data Stash. The T-Mobile plan doesn't apply to business users as the AT&T plan does.
AT&T said the unused data from a single month must be used in the following month.
AT&T's decision to roll over data is another example of T-Mobile's impact on the wireless industry in the U.S.
"T-Mobile has shaken up the industry and the others have to respond, especially given T-Mobile's net new customers," said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates. "The other carriers, including AT&T and Verizon and not just Sprint, are being affected by the aggressiveness of T-Mobile. For a long time, the big guys kind of ignored what T-Mobile did, but not anymore."