AT&T: Talk all day for three bucks

Ever the ugly duckling of the cell phone world, wireless carriers are dusting off their long-ignored prepaid plans as they hope to squeeze a little new life into this forgotten market.

The latest gambit: AT&T, beginning today, is offering a new form of prepaid plan, offering users all the wireless calls they can make in a single day, for a price of $3.

Prepaid plans have typically worked like a phone card, offering users a set number of minutes for a flat price (often 25 cents a minute). Once those minutes are up, they can renew the plan and buy more minutes to draw from. It's an easy and affordable way for minimal-usage customers to have a phone for use when they need it, without having to worry about a long-term contract.

But as the New York Times notes, "some subset of this group... won't even commit to minutes," and so AT&T is offering the new by-the-day plan for those flightiest of consumers.

The details of the new "GoPhone Unlimited" plan are awfully simple: On days you use the phone, you pay $3 and can talk all you want for nothing extra per minute. There's no minutes to rollover and no need to worry about mobile-to-mobile vs. mobile-to-landline minutes. It's three bucks a day if you use the handset, nothing if you don't.

Prepaid plans are on the rise and they're likely to continue to do so as economic worries linger on. And moves like this make me wonder what innovations in billing strategies might be next. $1 for an hour of unlimited calls, perhaps?

(It's also worth noting that AT&T has a hybrid plan available, too, costing $1 per day whenever you use the phone plus 10 cents a minute.)