If you live in an area with AT&T local phone service, and are considering Cingular/AT&T wireless service, check out the new AT&T Unity cell phone plans. For the most part, these are priced the same as existing Cingular plans but have a couple big differences. Unity plans expand free calling from all Cingular phones (free mobile-to-mobile) to free calling to all other AT&T lines. AT&T claims this means free calling to about 100 million phone lines overall.

To have a Unity plan, you must subscribe (or already have) to a qualifying unlimited AT&T local service plan PLUS an unlimited AT&T long distance plan.

What’s the Catch? There are a couple trade-offs here:

The lowest price Unity plan is $59.99, whereas the lowest regular Cingular plan is $39.99. Unless you are a moderate or heavy user of wireless, you may end up overspending to get the Unity feature.

Unity plans have no rollover feature.

The requirement to have local phone service, particularly the unlimited long distance feature, limits your ability to consider less expensive options that might better fit your calling patterns like VoIP or stand-alone long distance which is now as low as 2.5 cents/minute.