AT&T caps phone data usage with new wireless plans

If you can get buy without data other than on WiFi, you can get an inexpensive prepaid plan for voice only and just use WiFi for streaming. My wife doesn't talk much on he cell phone (about an hour a month or less) so her total cell phone expense is about $5/month. Free WiFi is great.

 

I need the texting and certain other features of the iPhone for work, and often need a bit of connectivity via 3G for that, primarily. Like checking weather and brief usage of apps, for example. But I avoid high throughput stuff like the plague when I'm not on a WiFi network.

Surfing the 'net on an iPhone feels like looking at a letter-sized piece of paper through a toilet paper tube.

Honestly, I feel like cheaper faster and widely available Internet connectivity will lead to advancements we can't even imagine, just as cheap electrification led to a whole range of appliances and other things which changed the 20th Century (and weren't imagined when electricity was all about making incandescent bulbs glow, and that was about it).

Bandwidth is the 21st Century equivalent of electrification, I believe.

 

what is your speedtest result?

 

AT&T data sucks. It's nowhere near stable. Sometimes it's fast sometime it's slow. I got one of those 5% data warnings and the unauthorized tethering warnings a couple of months ago half way through the billing cycle. I pulled 5.65GB the first 15 days and another 2.5GB the last 15 days of my billing cycle. I have since changed the APN settings to hide from AT&T's tether detector. I didn't notice my data was throttled to unuseable speed. However, it was down to 300k-700kbps. Normally it's 2mpbs-8mpbs. I got friends who pull 10-13GB a month. They stream Pandora everyday at work.

 

There was a time when unlimited meant unlimited.

 

Not that I want to defend ATT, even I am looking for the best practical replacement for their prepaid plan.

However, I thought it always was and still is unlimited data, but never included a promise of full speed.

 

^^ My ATT prepaid plan is a legacy from one or two mergers / brand names ago, kept because of the inertial problems of moving the number to another provider. The only cost issue was total price per year, not cost per minute, because I didn't use all the regular minutes and had substantial rollover inventory. But that is now gone.

When ATT moved to the GSM system and halved the prepaid coverage map, I lost important coverage locations, including dad's region. We moved DW to Tracfone, and that has been more than sufficient for her. Using ATT's GSM, its coverage seems closer to ATT's post-paid than prepaid map.

Virgin is cheaper, but for my needs its coverage is even worse than ATT prepaid, so it is a nonstarter.

Verizon's CDMA network has the best coverage map for my particular needs, but its prepaid offering otherwise seems no better than ATTs. (That is actually an improvement from when I first checked.) Tracfone does offer CDMA choices, but won't sell them here. I'd need to buy one away from home, and am not sure where they would allow me to register it.

Also, I'd like a basic web enabled phone with a small data allotment, but haven't adequately explored the offerings and their real capabilities and limits. While I could certainly put a full smartphone to use, I don't want to spend the money or waste the additional time they'll consume, and my livelihood doesn't depend on it. I already spend too much time on nonmobile connections.

 

^^ After discovering that Tracfone will now register and ship CDMA phones to my area (the local Tracfone vendors still offer only GSM units), I finally sprung of a semi-smart (i.e. web enabled) unit last month. It proved valuable during month's road trip through central Oregon - Nevada - Utah and northern Arizona. While it didn't have coverage everywhere, it did work in many places where my ATT prepaid and DW's Tracfone-GSM units had no service.

It also allowed us to find last minute lodging in central Utah just ahead of the solar annular eclipse. This wasn't on our planning radar, so we were caught unawares when nearly everything was booked full. Absent the new phone, we would have had to move out of that area without visiting Capitol Reef National Park and without seeing the wonderful full annular eclipse / Ring of Fire.

With Triple Minutes (i.e. $100/year buys 1200 minutes, $200/year buys 4500 minutes, and several other choices are available online), this easily covers my voice needs. The jury is still out on the web access, it clearly won't work for most who are accustomed to a full smart phone.

The old ATT plan has improved to 1000 minutes for $100/year, and Canadian roaming, and some improvements to its coverage map, but is still more than 50 miles short of dad's house. I'll keep it at least through a couple Canadian visits later this year. It also has a data option for full smart phones, which may still get explored if I become willing to pay for the real thing.

 

You used to be able to get unlimited data using the iphone loophone but AT&T closed it. Now the only way to get unlimited data using AT&T's network is Straight Talk.

 

I just logged into the AT&T management site, and it turns out I still have my unlimited data plan for my iPhone It costs the same as their 3GB/month plan, which I would be on if I didn't have the unlimited. Their smaller plan (300mb/month) isn't enough for me... Based on their data, over the past 6 months the only time I was under 300mb/month was December... and I was out of the country with my phone turned off for half the month! "Normal" usage for me is about 1GB/month, but there are times when I'm traveling that it gets used a lot more.

As for minutes... I have their cheapest minute plan I can get (450 minutes/month). With rollover, I'll have plenty of time to change that if I need to... in fact, I usually have 400+ rollover minutes expiring every month. It turns out that almost everyone I talk to on a regular basis is also on AT&T... So, a couple of hundred mobile-mobile minutes used each month (and those are unlimited), and only a few actually get deducted from my plan.

 

If they have roll over data, I wouldn't be too pissed if I ever lose my unlimited data plan and had to go to a tiered data plan.