A few weeks ago, we covered the fact that at&t was testing out netbook plans in the Philadelphia and Atlanta areas. Offering netbooks for as low as $50 just to give customers incentive to sign up for a two year wireless / data contract seems to have worked for at&t or it wouldn’t be going nationwide with its netbook plans. Lenovo, Dell, and Acer laptops are all seem to be up for grabs when at&t rolls its plans nationwide. Consumers do get about $200 discount on these netbooks, but they’ll have to part ways with $40-60 a month for at&t’s wireless plans.

While it’s surprising to see how successful at&t has been with its netbook wireless plans, this does show that the market may be more ready that a lot of us thought for netbook + wireless combo. You can buy a netbook for $400 and still save a whole lot of money by avoiding those wireless contracts. But a lot of adopters don’t know what to do with their netbooks without an Internet connection. While netbooks are very different from cell phones on the surface, they are useless to a lot of folks without access to the Internet. That’s most likely why people feel comfortable with paying $960 to $1450 for a wireless contract for their netbooks.

As much as I’d like to believe that we will see cheaper wireless plans for netbooks, people are still going to pay for these more expensive plans. at&t’s recent success in my hometown proves just that.