AT&T confirms its latest high-end plan, offering modest upgrades for $110 a month

Earlier this week, we learned AT&T was planning yet another new plan, this one under the branding Elite 2.0. Now the new plan is official, and, as rumored, it’s quite expensive. A single line of Elite 2.0 will set customers back $110, plus taxes and fees. Even those with four lines will still pay a whopping $75 per line.

You’d expect a lot from a plan at this price, but does AT&T actually deliver? Honestly, not really.

There are no streaming perks or any extras that broadly appeal to most mainstream customers. Instead, you get all the same benefits as the Premium tier, but with a few changes, like 250GB of hotspot access and 20GB of monthly global data for international travel. Beyond this, the only other major changes are the addition of their higher-priority Turbo tier, as well as one free smartwatch plan and one free tablet plan per Elite line.

We have to admit the smartwatch/tablet perk is one of the better offers in this plan if you’re a family with a lot of cellular tablets and smartwatches.

For most customers, Elite probably doesn’t have enough extra value to be worth the upgrade from the already high-end Premium tier. Still, if you use a lot of hotspot access, tablet, and watch lines, and need international access? This could actually be a cheaper plan for a small subset of users. Ultimately, Elite isn’t as mainstream as the other three major plans, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be a good option for a small minority.

Still, it does represent a continued trend we’ve seen from the big carriers: adding perks that are more obscure or niche and selling them as an upgrade to people who don’t necessarily do much homework. They simply see that one plan is billed as the “best” and they’d don’t stop to consider if there’s a better choice. Not surprising, but certainly a sign that the postpaid industry continues to decline in true value as the prepaid world rises to match it.