Same here. Got my OB a week ago and received similar email..eager to hear from experiences...

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Don't have my car yet, but looked into it some, as have young kids who like their tablets when I take the 5 hr trip to see the fam.

Free trial is 1 month.

If ATT is your wireless carrier, can add car to existing plan for $10/month. Just uses existing plan data, whatever you got.

If ATT is not your existing carrier, pricing varies. $15/month for 2 GB, then you're shut off. $20/month for unlimited data (potential for throttling after 2 GB). Or for $200 one time charge you can prepay 12 months of unlimited ($16.66/month), or $380 for 24 months ($15.83).

I would imagine, with the antenna fixed on the hood, the reception would be superior to a handheld. Still, in my experience, AT&T doesnt cover rural areas as well as Verizon, but obviously that may vary depending on your area.

 

It's 1GB and 1 month long. I didn't find it useful since it's just me driving there car but YMMV depending on if you want your passengers to use the WiFi in the car.

 

Cost to purchase monthly plan (without cell /mobal plan)?

AT&T sometimes offer the unlimited plan for $15/month (non-AT&T customers). They did it last October and it allows roaming in Canada. I posted about it on the Honda Insight(my car) forum.

Touring owners: AT&T offering $15/month unlimited...

https://myvehicle.att.com/#/honda/learn?country=US&language=en $15 for AT&T Connected Car Unlimited Plan (Prepaid 30-Day Auto-Renew): U.S. only. Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands excluded. Req’s signing up for standalone AT&T Connected Car Unlimited Plan (Prepaid 30-Day Auto-Renew)...

www.gen3insight.com

 

All, thanks for the input. I think I'll hold off until I can see a need. Maybe for a trip or something like that.

 

Just depends on what your use is going to be for such a thing.

For me (us), we are both on T-mobile, which is generally fine in the greater LA area, but not so much in the hills and more rural areas around California.
I have found though I am carrying my laptop around more and using it in the car, not while driving of course, but grabbing a bite, coffee, or whatever.
Often this 2020 car just seems so comfortable, I would rather sit in it on my laptop than sit in some crowded coffee shop (Its LA - everything here is crowded most of the time).

But also, my wife was starting to work more remotely with a laptop, sometimes while traveling in the car, so I went and did the free trial.
We went through the data pretty quick - well she did. But I found we were using it here and there, so I went ahead and signed up for their 24 month
unlimited data. It comes to about $19 a month.
I didnt think when I bought the car I would be activating this, but I have found its helpful at certain times. Case in point, I was out in Joshua Tree to see a friend
visiting from Europe who had rented an airbnb yurt on a big piece of empty property that had no internet/or cell service for Tmobile. Turned out the car hotspot worked fine and we were able to both communicate/ get email, check in with loved ones, etc.

Im not sure how much cost it would have been to make me decide against it. 15 a month would have been nicer, but I didnt think 19 a month was too bad in the end.

 

Check your current wireless plans...many allow hotspot mode for your cell phone...this will do the same thing. I'm on Verizon and I'm allowed about 16GB of hot spot a month...works great

 

I should have mentioned this - I am a hot spot user from my phone for a long time. If Im at a starbucks or some other random places I occasionally use my laptop - I always use my hotspot before using the business provided network. But as said, my carrier just doesnt have the coverage a lot of the time.

 

Yep, @jeff3820 , I was going to mention this.
Although in the case @Sequoia225 mentions, his provider (TMo) doesn't have adequate coverage, so it would require a switch.

I was a really-long time ATT customer (20+ years, until a few months ago), so I'm a partial-mod on their forums, and used to help people do all sorts of cost-analysis like this, up there (including publishing some cheat-sheet type stuff), and their network is great for most rural stuff.
In fact, Verizon is actually worse for most of our rural, in the PNW, but ATT sort of hosed everyone who had non-carrier devices, at the start of the year, so we moved, to the only other carrier with halfway-decent rural coverage here (I literally live 5mi due-N of TMo HQ, too, but their rural coverage is abysmal, just 30mi of town, otherwise I'd be with TMo, fingers-crossed on the merger, which should improve things).

Most people who have any kind of unlimited plan have a LOT of LTE-tethering data, typically 10-15GB, at least, some as much as 50-75/per-device, depending on the carrier/plan, and most just reduce you to 2G speeds (still pretty usable, for most things), after that (we have a combined 75, between our 3 devices, for example), after that.
In this case, it might be cheaper to just move to ATT, from TMo, but it's hard to say, it depends on what kind of deal is already in-play, 19 for the unlimited hotspot is a pretty good deal.
I wish ATT had similar deals for a regular hotspot device, but they limit their "screaming deals" like this to car-hotspots, for the most part (because they realize people are unlikely to really saturate their usage from the car).

 

We have it and regularly use around 8-10gb every month. Our kids use their iPads and my wife her phone or laptop, and I generally play podcasts. We managed to get in on the unlimited $15/mo offer so we kept it and really like having the car Wifi rather than trying to tether all those devices to my phone

 

It hasn't been that good in our experience. Frequent dropouts between Indianapolis and Cincinnati. When it worked it was great but more often than not it is dead air. Enough so that the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) number went way down because she kept disabling WiFi to use our Google Fi data.

I'll also add we were never given the $15/mo option so the cheapest was slightly more than $20/mo with an annual contract. I'll finish out our annual contract (as they won't prorate for early cancellation per contract) but doubt we will be renewing unless there is a significant increase in coverage.

TL;DR nice concept but coverage for us is awful so won't be renewing when our year contract is up unless they significantly improve coverage in our area between Indy and Cincy.

 

Last I checked ( 7 years ago) I couldn't even get a cell phone signal on my ATT networked phone when I moved out towards the coast in my little MA town. I had to switch to Verizon (then Tracfone on the Verizon network to get any coverage at all.) In any case, the more I think about this, the less I think I have any interest/ need.

 

I have WiFi in my Ascent, I love it! It's great that the kids can watch movies while we travel. No fighting over the single DVD player. The internet costs only about $25 a month for unlimited data, works everywhere except in the worst mountain passes, and I almost can't imagine having to drive without it at this point.

 

We have the Mobile WiFi activated in our Outback. It's 20 a month plus tax, you guys with $15 subscriptions are lucky! We probably have used a few GB already just having our devices connected while in the car, but I really wanted to keep it around as a backup and remote internet connection since I work from home. I can work from anywhere, really, so having that in the outback and being able to work if we are camping or something, is nice!

 

I gave up on the ATT WiFi which I activated in Dec 2019. We just do not drive nearly enough anymore since covid-19 hit. My measured data usage when we used it at the end was 200M per month. No sense paying $20/mo for 200M of usage. If we were using our Outback every day and sucking up lots of bandwidth I could see keeping it. But it isn't economical for us. They've been sending me emails lately to come back and save $5/month but it still isn't worth it.

 

Out in rural Missouri, AT&T has better coverage than my cell carrier, T-Mobile. I've had multiple instances where one carrier had no service, but the other did.

As soon as you activate, you'll get a $5/month off email if you subscribe immediately. They won't offer it to you again. You still get the free trial, and you can cancel at any time if you decide you don't want it.

 

I am in STL and got my cer end of 2019. I did not get any such offers :\

 

Does anyone with the 2020 Outback have the ATT Wifi? I realized a need for work and wanted to give it a try, however I created an account through the MySuabru App and I am getting an error that says its not available for my vehicle, 2020 Outback Limited XT.

 

I don't remember but I thought I set it up online AT&T

[edited to add] after I signed up we got hit by the pandemic. Turned out to have been a waste of money. But I'm on Google Fi.

 

I wish Subaru offered the option of using AT&T or Verizon as people have different carriers. I currently use my Verizon hotspot off my phone or mifi if we need it. Hopefully Subaru will give options in the future.

 

I rather a Sim card modem.... where I am non of the big company's have coverage. So a local start up put up towers for ems, police use . They now offer Sim cards for sale to local company's too.

 

We decided against it, and if needed will use the iPhones as a hot spot. I am not a fan of ATT. We had ATT before dropping it for Verizon due to ATT coverage and dropped call issues, and then moved to T-Mobile due to T-Mobile's unlimited everything plans that covered Canada. We vacation in Canada, and Verizon charged $25 in month-only increments for our single week in Canada and we ran out of data in 4 days, mainly due to navigation, email and weather apps.

That said, to make the best decision, one needs to actually know what their potential data consumption is. An iPhone or iPad will tell you that app by app. Siri (and voice transcription) is a data pig for me. I have found that using my ISP and router data tools that on my non-phone wired and wireless devices they vary widely for identical tasks. The iPad is thirsty, the WIndows laptop is next and then the WIndows desktop, with the Linux laptops and desktops being the most frugal by far.

Apart from deliberate downloads or streaming, I have found the largest amount of data use is the non-deliberate data use, such as background services, voice recognition, and constant pings and checks for analytics, updated info and software, as well as ads when browsing. I have extremely effective adblockers on the non-Apple products and that alone makes a big difference in consumption. Knowing your data consumption allows one to decide which data level of the plan would be best.

If other carriers (T-Mobile) could be used by SIMS as referenced above, or If I had children, I might consider a hotpoint, but I would then I would risk being visited by the ghost of my parents who would probably say, "Don't make me stop this car." That was their reaction to sibling taunts and boredom on long drives. I have to admit it worked for us.

 

For those wondering why Subaru didn’t also offer Verizon, the main reason is that AT&T is a GSM carrier, and Verizon is a CDMA carrier. 100% totally incompatible with each other. You have a GSM cellular modem locked to AT&T as a carrier. Is it possible to social engineer another GSM carrier (Cricket, TMobile, etc) to activate the cellular modem? Possibly, if you can get to the module and find the device’s CDMI. Heck, you might even be able to swap out the SIM card with that of another GSM carrier. Would that break StarLink? Quite probably, but who knows. Will it muck up your warranty? Quite possibly, but who knows until someone does it.

One thing fore certain though… It will never work with a CDMA carrier like Verizon.

 

Your information is severely dated. CDMA is Verizon's 3G network that no one uses anymore and will cease to exist at all the end of this year.

 

I was just looking at my ATxT bill and to upgrade to an unlimited plan for the cell phone, they call out specifically I can' use the cell phone hotspot to connect a car to the internet. Probably have to get its own hotspot device. Annoying! They stuff so much stuff in the fine print.

 

Wow, CDMA and GSM being mentioned - what's next, rotary phones and pagers?