Ars Technica doesn’t think AT&T’s new tiered data plans will be bad for consumers, and they’ve posted their own data usage charts from AT&T’s website to prove it. I was inspired to post my own, and I wasn’t terribly surprised to find that they were higher than Ars’ average:

Sure, my usage has gotten a bit lower in recent months, but I’m still dangerously close to the 2GB mark. If I was under AT&T’s new “DataPro” plan, I would’ve had to pay an extra $10 charge in December and January for my usage over 2GB.

My guess is that Byline is responsible for a lot of my data usage, and I’ve gotten better about switching to WiFi when syncing my feeds, so that probably accounts for much of the dropoff in April and May. (Byline is a spectacular app for RSS feed reading, by the way.) But if I started using my phone for tethering (the part of the new pricing scheme that has Gizmodo all flamed out ) I could easily be paying an extra $30-40/month in data charges — $20 for the tethering option $10/GB for the extra data. In the end, though, that’s just over half the monthly cost of a separate DataConnect card, so maybe it’s still a better deal?

In the interest of fairness, I suppose what we should really be complaining about is not that 1GB of data now costs $10, but that 160-byte SMS messages sill require a separate service plan at an additional cost.