There was quite a brouhaha surrounding AT&T and the new FaceTime over Cellular feature found in iOS 6 last year, with AT&T initially only allowing Mobile Share customers to use it, and then it offered the feature to any customer with an LTE device on a tiered data plan. Today AT&T opened things up a bit further, announcing that any customer with a tiered data plan can now make FaceTime calls over a cellular connection free of charge. This means that owners of non-LTE iOS devices, like the iPhone 4S, can make free FaceTime over Cellular calls.
AT&T says that it's started updating its systems to support the expanded FaceTime over Cellular functionality and that the update will start going out to customers "in the next couple of weeks." Customers won't need to do anything on their end, and it's expected that the update will continue to go out over the next several months.
Considering everything that's been going on with with this AT&T-FaceTime situation in recent months, including a threat of an FCC complaint, it's good to see that the big blue carrier has finally decided to open up and allow all tiered data plan customers to make FaceTime calls over a cellular connection. Of course, the key part of today's decision is the "tiered data plan" portion, which means that any AT&T customers that still have a death grip on their grandfathered unlimited data plan still can't use FaceTime over Cellular. That's not exactly a surprise, but it's still kind of a bummer. For any AT&T folk that've made the jump to tiered data on a non-LTE iOS, though, FaceTime over Cellular will soon be yours. Have any of you ever made a FaceTime call over a cellular connection?
