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AT&T brings back unlimited data plans, but there are some major catches …

If you’re feeling jealous of any friends grandfathered into an existing AT&T unlimited data plan (especially since ‘unlimited’ was redefined from ‘5GB before throttling kicks in’ to ’22GB before throttling if congested’), the company has good news: it is launching a brand new version of unlimited data tomorrow.

Pricing starts at $100/month for a single line, plus $40 for each individual line. Unfortunately, there’s bad news too. As The Verge notes, there are some pretty big catches – the biggest of which is that you need to be a DirecTV or U-Verse subscriber to be eligible, which of course adds to the cost if you don’t already have a subscription …

It’s clear where the company is going here: it’s leveraging its new DirecTV acquisition and existing U-verse TV services to promote video streaming on the go. While the plan itself doesn’t bundle in specific home TV packages, it’s designed to work hand-in-hand with DirecTV and U-verse’s out-of-home streaming apps. It just so happens that watching lots of video quickly burns up your data allowance — and AT&T’s more than happy to offer an unlimited plan to fix that problem.

The plan is also limited to smartphones. If you want to use it on your tablet, you’ll need to fork out a further $40/month so this plan can quickly get pricey.

If you want the plan but don’t currently have a qualifying TV subscription, the cheapest deal is a DirecTV package at $19.99/month. Alternatively, if you’re racking up the data mostly from streaming video, you may want to check out T-Mobile’s Binge On program, which doesn’t count data usage from a growing number of streaming video services.

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