Earlier today, I wrote that AT&T needed to do something to counteract Verizon Wireless’ latest salvo, and it did – within hours.

AT&T unveiled new voice pricing that is on par with what Verizon Wireless announced earlier today. For example, feature phone customers can choose unlimited talk for $69.99. Family Talk customers can choose unlimited talk for $119.99 per month.

AT&T also said that its smartphone customers, including iPhone users, can get unlimited monthly voice and data for $99.99, but if you want to add individual unlimited texting (which I hear is kinda popular these days), that’s another $20, bringing the price to about $120.

Verizon will charge a $30 per month data plan for smartphone users, so if you’re paying $90 for unlimited nationwide talk and text and add in data, it’s more like $120 a month. Unless I'm missing something, their pricing is more or less identical.

More broadly speaking, is it even-steven with these two? Not exactly. But AT&T deserves props for punching back to match Verizon’s prices, similar to how it did last year. Unless it was internally cooking up some new plans, AT&T didn’t have a lot of time to get the new pricing ready for all 2,200 company-owned retail stores and kiosks come Monday. It must have an extremely efficient marketing department, or somebody’s going to have a bummer of a weekend.