AT&T knocks it out of the park with outstanding new 12-month prepaid plan

AT&T probably hasn't made a lot of fans or earned many new customers after raising prices and quietly ditching popular freebies in just the last few weeks alone, but curiously enough, it appears that the third-largest US mobile network operator has also made a very positive change to one of its plans with minimal fanfare recently.

You'd think offering twice as much data as before at no extra charge was an upgrade worth at least a quick official announcement on the carrier's website or social media channels, yet here we are, digging up the info on the Slickdeals forum.

Get this hot new AT&T Prepaid deal right here

Of course, the killer new AT&T Prepaid promotion is fully and officially detailed as well, letting you effectively spend a measly 25 bucks a month on a whopping 16 gigs of "high-speed" data if you're willing to cough up $300 in advance.

That will cover an entire year of wireless service including unlimited talk and text within the US, Mexico, and Canada, as well as unlimited texts from the US to more than 100 countries, and yes, even mobile hotspot use (counted towards the aforementioned 16GB data allotment).

If the "multi-month" deal happens to sound familiar, that might be because it's been around for a couple of years in an 8GB iteration costing, you've guessed it, $300 for 12 months. In other words, AT&T has doubled the data here without charging anything extra, but only for new Prepaid subscribers.

If you don't have 300 bucks to spend at once or don't want to sign a 1-year "contract", you can of course always opt for a monthly AT&T Prepaid plan starting at $30 with just 5 gigs of "high-speed" data included. The other multi-month plan will set you back $99 for 90 days of service with 8GB data (each month), which no longer feels like a very good deal.

Boost Mobile is the only other carrier we can think of that does similar "multi-month" offers, predictably charging even less (specifically, $240 a year) for roughly as much data (15 gigs a month) or $300 for unlimited everything.

Naturally, that's far from a fair comparison for a variety of reasons, while Verizon and T-Mobile are yet to join this battle for the long-term business of their prepaid customers, which means their monthly rates add up to a whole lot more than what AT&T is charging here. Too bad those promised "high" speeds are in fact limited to 4G.