AT&T will no longer be offering two-year contracts to its customers starting next week, Jan. 8, 2016.
The carrier is the latest to eliminate such contracts, with T-Mobile getting rid of them in 2013, while Verizon and Sprint did so in 2015, according to CNN Money.
The elimination of the contracts narrows the customer's choice down to two - avail the "AT&T Next" program, which is a payment scheme that allows customers to pay the value of the phone through a time-frame, or to pay the full cost of the phone up front. However, it also means two other things - that users now have more freedom, since it would now be easier to switch carriers, and that customers will now have lower monthly rates after paying off the device, The Washington Post Reported.
AT&T's decision was not made just to join the other carriers and is in fact an expected move, given that in the third quarter of 2015, only one in five customers chose a contract plan when they signed up with AT&T or upgraded their phones, NBC News reported.
This means that device subsidies are becoming officially obsolete, and that the current trend is to create new business models that can keep up with the growing industry.
