But it doesn’t include tethering/hotspot. WTF? That’s a feature of my phone, not of a fucking plan.
Why is this a thing for US phone networks?
Why do they care whether the ones and zeroes sent/received stay on the phone or not? Data is data. It shouldn’t be any more complicated than that.
Because it’s not illegal to bill you extra for it.
Maybe they are in bed with ISPs.
Some of them are ISPs. I’ve received mail from both Verizon and AT&T about getting a 5G Internet “connection”. It just connects to the cell towers.
Someone came by so I demoed one and it was awful. The latency was, predictably, unhinged.
Because they can. I have the same gripe.
Money. Simple as that.
along with access to 30GB of high-speed data
Unlimited
Unlimited can be limited.
We just didnt know much much ;) /sI think the “high-speed” is the important part there. You have reduced speeds after the first 30Gb
That sounds like a limit with extra steps.
I would rather have unlimited with extra steps than unlimited with extra money
Have fun with an unusable “unlimited” connection
we have sonic in the west for 50$ and up to avg 8mgb
After the 30 GB, your speed will be throttled to 256 kbps. These are 2G speeds, painfully slow. So, as long as you’re sure you’re not going over the cap.
That’s a lot of data…
I have 50GB with the possibility to get 5G (but we mostly have 4G infrastructure) at 25€.
Just by talking to a sales rep on the phone and discussing what’s possible to retain me as a customer.How much of that data cap do you use?
A lot of my coworkers get unlimited, but when I ask about actual use, they don’t get close to even a lower tier. My SO wanted unlimited because they hit their previous cap (5GB), but we agreed to try the 15GB cap and they’ve been happy, not hitting the cap. We save a bit of money and they don’t need to worry about data caps anymore.
Everyone is different obviously, but I feel like a lot of people get unlimited when they don’t actually need unlimited.
I’ve definitely hit my 400GB cap once or twice and regretted switching from unlimited. Most months is 20-60 GB but the next highest option after 400 is 40 and I’d hit that too often. And yes, this is mobile. My desktop runs 24/7 and has a torrent client on, so I can get a terabyte per month on my home network too, though thankfully those are all unlimited in my country.
My household usage is well over 2TB/mo. It’s not unrealistic to expect individual usage to be fairly high outside of the house.
That’s higher than my household’s entire internet usage, and we’re not particularly light on the video streaming (I often have YT in the background when I WFH).
I can see 10-20GB/month for a single person being fairly reasonable if they steam music or something a lot while out and about.
I can see 10-20GB/month for a single person being fairly reasonable if they steam music or something a lot while out and about.
Which a lot of people do. And videos. And play games.
That’s not an unlimited amount of data.
Is it technically unlimited, just very very slow?
Assuming you somehow use up your original data cap in… Let’s say one incredibly data intensive day somehow. That leaves you with (30 days * 24 hrs/day) * 3600 seconds/hr * 256,000 bps = roughly 660 gigabytes. So I guess that’s probably the limit? Plus your original cap.
Limited to 256 kbps aka unlimited
80 GB per month if you max it out. Seems pretty limited to me…
Correct. But it’s a lot of data.
Its not really, I just checked and mine is 23gb usage a month and I work from home.
That still seems kind of high. Are you constantly streaming video/audio when not at home?
Well, I use 250/300 GB a month
That’s nuts. Our total internet usage for our house internet connection is about 100GB for the week, and that includes a lot of video streaming. You almost use as much as my household, but on your phone.
Most months I use <1GB because I mostly just browse the web when I’m not at work.
No that’s obviously my total usage, because I only have a mobile data plan and I use my phone’s hotspot when I’m at home
On the other hand though I limit myself at 480p streaming when I watch Twitch (which I do a lot) so potentially I could top your family’s total usage 😂
Lol. But yeah, if it’s your primary internet source, that makes sense. I imagine most people have a dedicated internet line at home, so you’re absolutely an outlier.
Exactly, imagine your speeds drop to sub dsl speeds after 30gb. Nonsense
Modern websites are excessively bloated. That data goes fast.
I highly doubt random websites are eating your data, it’s much more likely your videos and whatnot. I browse a lot on my phone and I generally use 1-2GB in a month. If I watch video, that’s gone in an hour.
It’s not uncommon for a single web page to use 5-10MB. Shopping and social media sites are the some of the worst since they have lots of javascript libraries and pictures. It’s not hard to use a couple GB in a day without streaming anything.
My only social media is Lemmy, and I’m not interested in the video content here, which probably explains my low data usage. When I’m on data, I’m mostly reading text (news, technical docs for personal projects, etc), submitting text (Lemmy, bug reports, etc), or occasionally looking at rendered charts (stocks, statistics, etc). I usually use about 1GB/month.
My SO uses Instagram, listens to YouTube when going for a walk, etc, and is a much heavier user than I. Most of that’s on WiFi, but they keep the same habits when going out each day. We recently needed to bump from 5GB to 15GB data cap, and a typical month is probably 8GB or so now.
So that’s my metric for lean and typical users. Using more than double my SO’s cap sounds like a lot of data and puts you in outlier territory.
Meanwhile, Google slurps up all your data to send you better ads.
send you better ads.…sell your data to yet further enrich themselves.
Pick your poison.
I choose my town co-op that doesn’t sell my info, and doesn’t care that I torrent. 🙂
This is a cellular plan though, so… what do you do when you are out of town…?
Murder!
Someone didn’t find this funny, but I did, well done
Or pay them and have it both ways.
I used to loudly support Google Fi when I switched to them from Verizon. My coverage wasn’t as good, but my bill was a small fraction of what it had been, and I’m usually on wifi so the pay for what you use model was great for me. I also really enjoyed taking it with me to Mexico on vacation. Sweet deal since my average data use was like 1GB/month.
Then like a year ago, I did some digging and found that I could have a very similar experience with Mint, except unlimited data for about the same price. Plus the price was locked in because you pay for it up front. It took maybe an hour to swap our phones over, and we kept our phone numbers. There was a little bit of hassle getting voicemail to work properly, but that got figured out.
My favorite thing about these types of services are that you can buy a pretty cheap, unlocked phone, use eSIM, and you’re not locked into your service provider. I am a fan of the Pixel a series of phones since they’ve got plenty good capability at half the price of flagship phones, but with good support. Others love the option to dump Android for Graphene OS but I really haven’t seen a compelling argument for why I personally should go to the trouble since I don’t see enough of a benefit for my use case. But that’s neither here nor there. I just like unlocked phones, and my 8a and my wife’s 6a were cheap and they were easy to transition to another provider; look into unlocked phones the next time you’re shopping for one so you can have that kind of freedom.
US Mobile is a good option too, even cheaper than Mint IIRC and you can switch yourself between Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile networks.
US Mobile is the best deal I’ve been able to find with their yearly unlimited plans. I pay once around Black Friday for what I paid for 2 months of service on Verizon
Yeah, we used Google Fi for a bit, but then I did the math and found a better offer. I use very little data so I use Tello ($8/month), and my SO uses a lot more so they have Mint (15GB plan). All in all, it’s cheaper than Fi.
I also don’t use much data and found Keepgo to work well. It has data plans that don’t expire, you just buy the data and use it until it’s gone. 10GB ($42) usually lasts me the whole year.
Others love the option to dump Android for Graphene OS but I really haven’t seen a compelling argument for why
I mean if you don’t care for privacy or security then you won’t.
I personally should go to the trouble
The only trouble is plugging in your phone and clicking a few buttons on the website.
privacy and security
I’m not really sure how much my OS affects that though. If I remove that avenue, cool, but I’m still signed in on my browser and YouTube and various other apps, so to really protect my privacy and security, wouldn’t I need a whole slew of other changes to actually be effective? Credit bureaus, which I never even asked to have involved, can’t even keep a lid on my shit. How secure and private can I really expect to feel just from changing my phone OS, and is that warm fuzzy really good enough to justify moving from something that is working exactly as I want and expect to something that is, in a word, uncertain?
Not trying to attack you or anybody with these questions, just kinda frustrated that any time I’ve tried to look into it, all I find is a vague statement about privacy without any real elaboration, or worse, a bunch of speculation that the guy running it is unstable or something. Idk, it just feels a little like the wave of people screaming the praises of crypto.
It’s a little more than that. I had to manually install speech-to-text and fiddle with language downloads and mic permissions to get that to work on my 8a. And I had to disable exploit protection on my banking app so it would launch. And… well that’s about it. The rest was basically identical to setting up stock Android.
This is really nice for me. I’m actually going to save a good chunk of money. Usually use between 2 and 5 gigs a month. On the flex plan that’s 40-70 dollars.
I used to be a huge fan of Fi, especially as someone who would frequently travel, as it was really cheap to use both at home and abroad.
That was all until they pulled the rug from under me and i got slapped with bills for an inactive plan.
Even Amazon with their AWS would cancel stuff if you’ve clearly not been using your instance, but these guys changed the agreement and said fuck you anyway.
Not that it matters anyway, because genocide supporters don’t deserve any clients
US prices for mobile data are well above most countries still, even in the “third world”
Try Canada. Our prices are about half as much again as US, even when you account for the exchange rates.
Australia here, I have a 100GB plan with unlimited calls Australia-wide for AUD40 a month. With the current miserable exchange rate with the US, that’s about USD25/mo.
And any unused data rolls over each month so now I have (checks)… 4.22TB of data available, because I have a dual-sim phone and my work sim does all the heavy data usage.
I wouldn’t suggest relying on Google for anything. https://killedbygoogle.com/
Search and Gmail are probably about the only thing they won’t kill.Seems like they are trying to kill search. The pillow is on its face and they are slowly starting to push.
Old news bud. Privacy is what they’re killing/abandoning now.
Maps I bet they won’t kill. Or GCP. On a long enough timeframe though, who knows
'Member when YouTube TV was $35/mo? Now it’s around $83 I think
