(Photo Illustration by Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

AT&T today launched a new 2GB, $15/month plan it says is designed to help financially stressed families through the COVID-19 crisis, although it's probably also a response to T-Mobile's recent announcement of a similar 2GB, $15/month plan.

The new AT&T service plan is part of its prepaid service, which you can find at att.com/prepaid. You get unlimited talk and text plus 2GB of data for $15; after 2GB your data becomes very slow, AT&T says, but it isn't entirely cut off. That said, in my experience once those throttles hit, the data is too slow to use for work or school.

AT&T is also adding 10GB of data to existing AT&T prepaid and Cricket subscribers' plans for each of the next two months, and to new subscribers for the next month (except for that 2GB plan.) Plans with tethering will get 10GB of additional tethering data on the same basis.

Wireless carriers and ISPs have been lifting data caps and expanding service plans during the COVID-19 crisis, as well as improving their data capacity by turning on previously unused wireless spectrum held by Dish, cable companies, and investment firms.

But the AT&T Prepaid plan feels to me less like a COVID move and more like a competitive one. As part of its settlement with governments that allowed it to merge with Sprint, T-Mobile had to launch a new $15 2GB plan, and AT&T clearly doesn't want to lose all of its highly price-sensitive prepaid customers.

This is one of the many ways the Sprint/T-Mobile merger is likely to benefit consumers in the short term, as the newly merged carrier moves fast to take market share from AT&T, Verizon, and cable companies. Any higher consumer prices coming from the merger would come years down the road, if the three major carriers fell into a more stable competitive configuration (and provided Dish doesn't do anything to upset the apple cart).

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