2 phones, $190/mo, I'm tired of it.

Unit74

Unit74

Final Approach
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Unit74
Verizon is really cutting into my flight time. Any PIREPS on the low budget cut rate carriers? I use about 3 gigs between them. Mostly my ol lady Facebooking though when she should be earning me more Avgas instead.
 
Unit74 said:
Verizon is really cutting into my flight time. Any PIREPS on the low budget cut rate carriers? I use about 3 gigs between them. Mostly my ol lady Facebooking though when she should be earning me more Avgas instead.
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I switched to T-Mobile. Got twice the data for 10 bucks less than my Verizon plan rate.... which was already discounted 22% due to my employer discount.

Reception has been fantastic. Not a lot of carrier bloat on the phone. Billing is straightforward. I have no complaints whatsoever.
 
Unit74 said:
Verizon is really cutting into my flight time. Any PIREPS on the low budget cut rate carriers? I use about 3 gigs between them. Mostly my ol lady Facebooking though when she should be earning me more Avgas instead.
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If you own Verizon phones... goto Walmart, total wireless. They only use Verizon, I pay $100 for 4 lines, 15gb. I think two lines is $60 for 8gb no contract.. don't like it, walk away.
 
I'm on T-Mobile as well. Pricing is a lot better and they generally treat their customers better.

The downside? Outside of heavily populated areas, the coverage can be pretty spotty. I've also run into areas where they have roaming only and you only get 100MB of roaming data/mo.... that doesn't go very far these days.
 
Just about everyone I know uses Straight Talk from walmart. Either ATT or Verizon network (Red USA on box = VZ, blue = ATT). Just buy the SIM and use a verizon smart phone (your current one will work). $45/mo for 5 GB or $55 for 10 GB. Cant beat it.
 
jbrinker said:
Just about everyone I know uses Straight Talk from walmart. Either ATT or Verizon network (Red USA on box = VZ, blue = ATT). Just buy the SIM and use a verizon smart phone (your current one will work). $45/mo for 5 GB or $55 for 10 GB. Cant beat it.
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If you have more than 1 line Total Wireless beats it (it's actually the same company as Straight talk... I switched from ST to TW when I needed more lines)
 
Moved to Cricket which is really AT&T from Verizon. 4 phones (we could have a 5th same price) for $100 a month all inclusive.

The downsides data is capped at 8Mbs and you get 2.5 GB a month which for us is fine since we are in wireless 90% of the time.
 
Unit74 said:
Verizon is really cutting into my flight time. Any PIREPS on the low budget cut rate carriers? I use about 3 gigs between them. Mostly my ol lady Facebooking though when she should be earning me more Avgas instead.
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Check out Page Plus: https://www.pagepluscellular.com/ They use Verizon's network, so your current phones will work. I do fine on the $30 plan, whereas my wife gets by
on the $12 plan (flip phone, doesn't use data at all). My son, OTOH, usually runs out on the $40 plan. Haven't sprung for one of the more pricey ones yet.

Dave
 
jbrinker said:
Just about everyone I know uses Straight Talk from walmart. Either ATT or Verizon network (Red USA on box = VZ, blue = ATT). Just buy the SIM and use a verizon smart phone (your current one will work). $45/mo for 5 GB or $55 for 10 GB. Cant beat it.
Click to expand...

I used Straight Talk for a long time and liked them, but they weren't so accommodating phone-wise back then. You basically had to use one of their phones. They also didn't let you use a phone's hotspot. I don't know if they do now. The hotspot was important to me because although I rarely actually use it, I want it available when I need it.

In any case, I switched to AT&T Prepaid (GoPhone). The plan I have is $45.00 / month or $40.00 if you choose autopay. Plus I get 5 percent back from AmEx, so it comes out to $38.00 / month for unlimited U.S. talk, unlimited text to the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and 3 GB data with 30-day rollover. After 3 GB, it supposedly slows to 128K. I wouldn't know because I've never used more than 500 MB.

They also have a $60.00 / month plan ($55.00 with auto-pay) that adds on unlimited talk between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and ups the data cap to 6 GB with 30-day rollover.

AT&T GoPhone also offers multi-line discounts, but all the phones must be on the $60.00 / month plan. They take $5.00 off the second line, $10.00 off the third, $15.00 off the fourth, and $20.00 off the fifth. So if you had five phones and the auto-pay discount on the first one (they don't allow the discount on the additional lines), you'd be paying $245.00 / month for five lines, or $49.00 each / month, and each would have 6GB data and 30-day rollover. There is no data sharing. Each line gets its own 6 GB.

Rich
 
Are you off contract? Walk into the Verizon store and tell them you want to cancel your service becuase they're just too expensive. I did that with my wife's phone, I was going to switch her to Straight Talk. I had just gotten a corporate phone, so I dropped my line just to drive the point home. They ended up offering me a plan for her that was cheaper than anything they "officially" offered. Not as cheap as ST, but less hassle.
 
Government contract price? Worked for me back in the day. :)

Unit74 said:
Verizon is really cutting into my flight time. Any PIREPS on the low budget cut rate carriers? I use about 3 gigs between them. Mostly my ol lady Facebooking though when she should be earning me more Avgas instead.
Click to expand...
 
jbrinker said:
Just about everyone I know uses Straight Talk from walmart. Either ATT or Verizon network (Red USA on box = VZ, blue = ATT). Just buy the SIM and use a verizon smart phone (your current one will work). $45/mo for 5 GB or $55 for 10 GB. Cant beat it.
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That's what I use (the $45/mo package) and I am VERY happy. :)
 
Good suggestions above, all. Similar to the much more in depth discussions about the main carriers and MVNOs over at howardforums.com which has been a cell geek haven for a long long time.
 
I use ultramobile.com, a T-Mobile MVNO. $19/mo, bring your own unlocked phone.
 
GeorgeC said:
I use ultramobile.com, a T-Mobile MVNO. $19/mo, bring your own unlocked phone.
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The only problem with TMO MVNOs is that I haven't found any that will hop on to ATT's towers when there's no TMO tower in range. TMO's own prepaid would, the last time I checked, at least for voice and SMS (but not MMS or data), but their MVNO's will not.

When I first moved out of The City, the first place I lived was within eyesight of a TMO tower, so I used TMO. It worked out fine because although TMO's towers were rather sparse, the phone would hop on to ATT when needed, so at least I had voice and text pretty much anywhere I went. But when I moved to my current home, there was only VZW service, so I switched to ST over VZW. That was fine save for the then-limited selection of phones and the prohibitions against tethering or hotspots.

When ATT planted a tower nearby, I decided to jump ship. It wasn't easy because the sales side of ATT's system didn't know that the tower existed, and ATT's policy was to decline potential customers if the company didn't believe they had service at the customer's location. It was pretty bizarre. You could buy a GoPhone off the rack at Dollar General and then call ATT customer service from that phone using ATT's signal, and they still couldn't activate you if the ZIP code you provided was not in their database of places where they had service. Their system wouldn't allow it, and the CSRs couldn't override it.

The policy was there for a good reason: to prevent customers from activating service that the company didn't think it could provide. But the implementation was bad. The sales side's databases didn't update right away when new towers were planted, and the CSRs had no ability to override.

The simple workaround was to hang up and then activate the phone using the ZIP code of Some Other Place where you knew that ATT knew that they had service. Then once the service was activated, immediately change the address to your real one (or to just leave it be if you planned to use store-bought refill cards to pay the bill rather than paying online).

But to do that, I had to actually get a SIM card, which their system wouldn't allow to be mailed to an address where they didn't believe that they had service. That left me with two choices: Either buy a cheap GoPhone at the local Dollar General just to get the SIM card, or make the 50-mile drive to the nearest AT&T store to get a SIM card. I made the trip and activated the phone.

So yeah, it was a bit of an adventure. But since then, the service has been both cheap and flawless, so I have no complaints.

Rich
 
Unit74 said:
... I use about 3 gigs between them. Mostly my ol lady Facebooking though when she should be earning me more Avgas instead.
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My wife and I are on PureTalk's family plan. We are not heavy phone users, so our total bill (for both phones) is $15.00. (No typo. $15.00/month for two phones). Minutes we don't use in a given month roll into the next month and we usually under-run. Our current accumulated minutes from rollovers is like 1,500/25 hours.

Our key to saving money is that we don't have a data plan, though PureTalk has some data plans at reasonable rates. For us anyway, we are either in a car or we are somewhere where there is WiFi. In the car, the only thing we want is a navigation program. For this we use CoPilot, which uses downloaded maps. We download the maps on WiFi (currently I have all US and Canada, but I have downloaded foreign country maps when we were traveling.) and from that point we don't need data access and we don't need to worry about the navigation going TU when cell coverage is weak or nonexistent.

Music? I have 8GB stored on my phone.

When we're traveling in the US I buy a month of data from ATT for one or both of our Nexus 7 tablets. Then we can use Yelp, AirBNB, etc. when on the road and we have a screen that is significantly easier to work with. But we don't need any of that stuff when we're home.

So is Facebooking in the car important enough that it's worth the financial burden?
 
Well, it looks like I'm the dumb ads that's been getting bent over for the past umpteen years. Been with VZW for probably 11 years now.


So total Wirelesss of Straight Talk looks like the best routes.
 
Unit74 said:
Well, it looks like I'm the dumb ads that's been getting bent over for the past umpteen years. Been with VZW for probably 11 years now.


So total Wirelesss of Straight Talk looks like the best routes.
Click to expand...

Just as long as the network they use (not their own) has coverage where you want it. Verizon is expensive. But we switched our corporate phones over to it because they have the best coverage by far, in places where we need it. Military bases and their immediate environs. T-Mobile was good and cheap except away from urban areas. I don't know whose network Straight Talk nor Total Wireless use (maybe it varies?) but it would pay to find out.

John
 
jsstevens said:
Just as long as the network they use (not their own) has coverage where you want it. Verizon is expensive. But we switched our corporate phones over to it because they have the best coverage by far, in places where we need it. Military bases and their immediate environs. T-Mobile was good and cheap except away from urban areas. I don't know whose network Straight Talk nor Total Wireless use (maybe it varies?) but it would pay to find out.

John
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Total Wireless is solely Verizon, Straight Talk is either ATT, Verizon, TMO depending on which sim card you put in.
 
Sheesh, $190/month? What kind of greedy capitalist pigs are you feeding?
I pay $100/year for mine and am perfectly happy with the service and coverage. And the phone wasn't overpriced either, $40 on Vamazon.
 
Project Fi is awesome. I pay $30 per month usually. Sign into wifi where ever possible and you wont be charged for data. It runs on 3 carriers, Tmobile, Sprint and US Cellular. If none of those are available or the wifi is strong, it will make a call on that instead. Awesome when you are in a steel building. You can just buy the Pixel, 5x or 6p (used motorola nexus 6) at a considerable discount when you start Fi service. There is no downside, you can just take your fully unlocked phone elsewhere if you like.

Before that I used to use Page Plus, the $30 per month plan. Verizon.
 
BigBadLou said:
Sheesh, $190/month? What kind of greedy capitalist pigs are you feeding?
I pay $100/year for mine and am perfectly happy with the service and coverage. And the phone wasn't overpriced either, $40 on Vamazon.
Click to expand...

What are you using? I am king of cheap and managed to pay $12.00 per month for a full year before I threw in the towel. It was difficult to say the least - very convoluted set of apps I had to manage to keep from using data or minutes.

Please share. I need to know.
 
avongil said:
What are you using? I am king of cheap and managed to pay $12.00 per month for a full year before I threw in the towel. It was difficult to say the least - very convoluted set of apps I had to manage to keep from using data or minutes.

Please share. I need to know.
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The simple answer is TracFone. But there are many low-cost (understand "not greedy") carriers out there for us smart people. We get the service we need and we pay for how much we use. No BS charges.
 
Through a comedy of errors I ended up drowning my new ish phone at work. I took it apart and dried it overnight in front of a fan after clearing the dirt off and nothing. Went to buy another one (Cricket) in the same store I bought it from (and switched from ATT in front of them). They charged me an upgrade fee for the same phone. Equal or greater value. Didn't have the time to order one offline or fight them about it but that stings. Other than that the service is pretty good in Fort Worth and it's cheap (35 a month autopay).
 
overdrive148 said:
Through a comedy of errors I ended up drowning my new ish phone at work. I took it apart and dried it overnight in front of a fan after clearing the dirt off and nothing. Went to buy another one (Cricket) in the same store I bought it from (and switched from ATT in front of them). They charged me an upgrade fee for the same phone. Equal or greater value. Didn't have the time to order one offline or fight them about it but that stings. Other than that the service is pretty good in Fort Worth and it's cheap (35 a month autopay).
Click to expand...


That's like getting a divorce and then getting remarried the next day........to the same beast!!!!
 
Unit74 said:
That's like getting a divorce and then getting remarried the next day........to the same beast!!!!
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And paying for the whole experience!

I wanted to remind him that I -just- switched carriers and that I brought my business to his store - twice! There's even a Cricket store closer. And I am repaid with a 25 buck fee for upgrading to the same phone. The guy didn't even try to upsell me on the insurance until I asked about it too. Customer walks in who just drowned his phone and you let that go over your head? I wanted to tell him T-mobile is right down the street and I can order this phone off Amazon for cheaper than you are selling it but I had to get to work...
 
Unit74 said:
Well, it looks like I'm the dumb ads that's been getting bent over for the past umpteen years. Been with VZW for probably 11 years now.
Click to expand...

Cripes, $2300/yr for 11 years is $25k! I feel for you.

Anyway, a bit more information would be useful. If you are using mostly voice/texts and very little data while your wife is the opposite then you might want to use 2 different carriers and/or plans. I suggest doing a deeper dive into your usage patterns.
 
ifly4fun said:
Total Wireless is solely Verizon, Straight Talk is either ATT, Verizon, TMO depending on which sim card you put in.
Click to expand...

Last time I checked, ST (which is actually re-badged TracPhone) exclusively used the network to which the phone was assigned. In other words, there is no roaming on other carriers' towers at all. I think that would mainly affect a decision to use ST over TMO. There are many good things that can be said about TMO, but their coverage still lags behind ATT and VZW. Unless I lived in and rarely left a place where TMO had good signal, I don't think I would use TMO without roaming capability. Their towers get rather sparse once you venture out of the cities.

My friend in the business tells me that TMO's own prepaid service, however, still roams on ATT at plan levels of $40.00 / month and higher. Even better, it now includes roaming data -- as long as the data use is not "excessive," which is not clearly defined in the TOS. But considering that TMO prepaid didn't include any data roaming at all when I used it, whatever they offer now is an improvement. It also may be a reason to go with TMO's own prepaid rather than ST or another MVNO.

Speaking of roaming, here's another peculiarity: ATT GoPhone service (their own higher-tier prepaid label, as opposed to Cricket, which is a lower-tiered service that they run like an MVNO) technically does not roam. But there are a few places where it does. I don't know why. I mainly notice it in small populated places along rural portions of Interstates or other major roads in very remote locations. My GoPhone, which technically doesn't roam, will latch on to a TMO tower anyway for voice and SMS (but not data or MMS). I don't know whether that's a feature or an oversight on ATT's part. I suspect the latter.

My point, however, is that ST and other MVNOs typically don't include any roaming at all. That could be a big deal if they're working on TMO or Sprint. If they're on ATT or VZW, probably not so much.

Rich
 
I'll stick with Verizon thanks. 3 lines 16 GB shared $140 month. Probably not the best deal out there but I've been out cropdusting Pine trees in Nowheresville Georgia and had 4G the whole time. For that matter the whole cropdusting season I've been in the middle of nowhere Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and pretty much had 4G the whole time. At least I've been able to sit and read PoA all summer anyhow and isn't that whats important here ?
 
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Coverage & roaming is definitely a consideration with the MVNOs. With PureTalk, I am on the AT&T network exclusively. The AT&T map is pretty good but I found that my phone was dead in the neighborhood of Tomah, WI, where there are apparently no AT&T towers. Quite a surprise, since Tomah is the intersection of two interstate highways. But it's also true that we drove halfway across the country last summer and had zero coverage issues.
 
And as a counter to Rich's we'll described MVNO vs true carrier roaming agreement thing...

I had to dump Tmo (actually liked them) because they started refusing to pay their bills to Viaero Wireless out here in Northeastern CO for data service. They'd pay to roam phone calls and texts but not data.

Up in Nebraska and Wyoming they continued to pay. But like it always was, limited to 3G data speeds. Never LTE even if it's available.

The inter-op agreements are not only complex, but ever-changing.

We had service for a year and a half before they decided they were losing money on the old A/B side border between the old AMPS carriers (which is where it switches from AT&T and T-Mobile native native to Viaero just east of Denver).

Plus I worked for a company run by Lajere. I know his MO. T-Mobile is destined to remain third-rate forever and he'll be quite rich keeping it there. All the fancy marketing in the world won't save them without deployed spectrum.

Anyway. Watch those gotchas like coverage maps that show you can roam somewhere but when you get there you learn it's on 1xRTT only. LOL. The carrier's never show anyone the real details. And they reserve the right to change the deals on roaming, daily.
 
> "The simple answer is TracFone."

That's what I've been using since the late 90's. I've yet to find myself somewhere without coverage.

When going to Mexico I used to be amazed that TF was able to cut my signal off right at the border . . . as if I had passed through an invisible wall. I wondered that they could cut the signal so finely. Then, one day, I happened to notice my phone has a GPS. It had been "on" since I got the phone obviously. I turned it off. Next time I went to Mexico - TJ anyway - the phone stayed alive.

How could I not know it had a GPS? Don't I use it for navigation or other location-oriented uses? No. I don't carry it unless I'm travelling. Plus, it's not a smartphone (although TF does have them). It's a Samsung S425G, a virtually indestructible little thing with a slider keyboard for texting. I don't know why it has a GPS chip in it - I suppose the phone has some smartphone capabilities although the screen is very small.

Woot popped up recently with something called FreedomPop.

https://www.freedompop.com/phone

For $40 I became a sucker (Woot customer) and ordered something with a 5 inch screen that's called a Sharp "Aquos Crystal". If I understand the situation correctly, that will be the only money I'll need to spend on this free 4G/3G phone service as long as I don't exceed 200 minutes per month. I doubt I use 200 minutes per year with my TracFone. To keep the same number I renew each year with a one-year card for under $200. The S425G is a "triple minute" phone so the minutes that come with the one-year card are tripled. They roll over each year and accumulate over time. I'll probably never consume the minutes that are currently on the phone. I'm perfectly happy with my TF but bought this thing below just on a lark. FreedomPop (via Woot) had other phones to choose from but I liked the weird name of this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Sharp-Aquos-Crystal-Silver-Mobile/dp/B00O15E3MQ

I probably won't be able to tether it to my laptop, but I'm hoping there's a way to do it. That's partly why I threw forty bucks at it, just to see.

FreedomPop may be worth checking out - those looking for low-cost phone service. They have "better" quality service if a person wants to go crazy and spend $3.99/mo.

Someone on Woot familiar with FreedomPop said they use Sprint's network.
 
A friend of mine is using Consumer Cellular. If I recall correctly , his monthly is $120 for 4 devices, including a tablet. Since he was formerly on ATT, his devices were compatable. I don't know about its roaming policy though but appears to have some good rates overseas, if you travel.
 
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