Walmart's data plans painfully expensive, not meant for geeks

Walmart is getting into the wireless service business, but not in a way that will appeal to geeks or smartphone buffs. The company says that it will begin offering mobile plans, to run on T-Mobile’s network, in order to “help families stay connected while saving money,” and that the service will be sold exclusively in Walmart stores starting on September 20.

The plans do offer blindingly affordable “unlimited talk and text” plans. For only $45 per month, Walmart customers can get unlimited voice minutes plus unlimited texts per month without any kind of contract. That’s at least $15 per month cheaper than T-Mobile’s best contract-free unlimited talk and text plans.

A similar plan from AT&T costs $70 per month with a two-year contract, and Verizon costs almost $90 per month.

Is there a catch to Walmart’s offerings? You bet. The available data plans are blindingly expensive, locking out much of the lucrative and quickly growing smartphone market. A single gigabyte of prepaid data through Walmart costs $40, which is quite steep compared to AT&T’s 2GB for $25 per month, or T-Mobile’s $30 per month for unlimited data.

The upside is that Walmart’s data is shared by all of the lines on the account and carries over until it runs out. In a way, it’s not surprising—Walmart has set its target on lower- to middle-income families who are still heavily dependent on affordable feature phones, so what would they possibly want with so much data anyway? If the majority of users have feature phones with limited Web capabilities, it makes sense to offer limited data that can be shared, and at a premium.

That being said, the company’s announcement says that it does plan to offer Android phones and other with touchscreens, which shows that the company does have some plan to sell more Internet-capable devices. Those users will have a rude awakening when they try to price out data plans, though. Serious data hogs will undoubtedly stick to a carrier that is more dedicated to supporting smartphone users.