Sources familiar with the matter say that AT&T’s “Project Alice” involves the eradication of its two-year contracts. If AT&T gets rid of contracts, it would mean the carrier’s Next program, which lets you pay off your phone through monthly installment plans and upgrade your phone at a faster rate than two-year contracts allow, would become the only way for people to buy a phone on AT&T. The plan to end all contracts is rumored to roll out at the end of May, but AT&T will not offer unlimited data packages like T-Mobile does.
At this point, AT&T requires that you have a positive credit check if you want to sign up for Next. If your credit check gets declined, your only option then becomes a two-year contract. Whether these credit checks will remain a requirement or not is still up in the air, though given that the Next program might be the only way to buy an AT&T phone in the future, we’d imagine that requirement will be altered in some way.
T-Mobile kicked off its Uncarrier ways back during CES 2013, when the company announced it would kill off two-year contracts in favor of installment plans. Eventually, T-Mobile introduced Jump!, which lets you pay an extra amount of money per month to have the ability to upgrade phones at a faster clip. Verizon and AT&T followed suit with their own versions of Jump!, to varying degrees of success.
Of course, because none of this has yet to be confirmed, we are treating this as a rumor. Even so, we will update this post when we learn more.
