American telecommunications company AT&T is starting the year with some price increase. Following the steps of competitor Verizon, $5 has been added to the charge for upgrading or activating a device, bringing the $20 charge to $25 beginning January 20.

Digital Trends reports that a similar change was made by Verizon recently, along with other less-than-thrilling announcements. Starting from rising the said charges from $20 to a staggering $30, some services will be changed and/or removed, one of which is the cutting the cord on some unlimited data customers.

A spokesperson from AT&T has confirmed the change, referring to it as the company "making a minor adjustment". The timing for the price hikes occur despite the fierce competition in the mobile market, which are also joined by T-Mobile and Sprint. The hikes, however, could determine the subscriber movement in the coming months. As they have reportedly lost around 268,000 postpaid customers, Verizon has lost around 36,000 subscribers, which counts as the eighth quarter that numbers have been bad on that standpoint.

Another part of their "minor adjustments" may come from their shift of customer focus. The Dallas-based company seems to be leading its efforts on keeping their high-end subscribers on both the postpaid and prepaid sides. As Fierce Wireless reports, monetizing this target market as affective as possible seems to be working for them, as the reported revenues for the company's third quarter is at $40 billion, which is up by 4.6 percent.

Starting out as Cingular Wireless, AT&T Mobility (or just AT&T) started the wireless game on 2000, though the AT&T name was adopted by 2011 after its acquisition. It has approximately 133.3 million subscribers, second only to Verizon Wireless. The Apple iPhone was also exclusively carried by AT&T from its release in 2007 until 2011, when the iPhone 4 was released for Verizon.

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