Cell Phone Plans - an update
I last wrote about cell phone plans (and our choices) just about a year ago. Then, we had opted for Mint Mobile and Google Fi. These days, we’re on a slightly different path, having swapped Google Fi for Visible, a Verizon second-tier plan.
It took us until August to leave land and its attendant wifi-all-the-time luxury, so it wasn’t really until August that any real limitations of the plans became obvious. Between basic coverage (ie having a signal at all) and data usage (ie using the internet), we were running into unforeseen snags.
Both Mint Mobile and Google Fi are essentially on the T-Mobile network. A second-tier level of the network. A second-tier level of a network that, as far as where we have cruised so far, is not particularly robust or widespread. This meant that most often, either both of us had coverage or neither of us did. (Before you say that Google Fi has network switching, we have not found that to be the case in reality. I think it’s a marketing ploy, or maybe only usable with certain Google phones. In any rate, there wasn’t much network switching happening.)
Using a phone as a hotspot (basically turning it into the internet server for multiple devices) seemed to use data faster.
Google Fi’s “pay what you use” added up very very fast, especially when using the phone as a hotspot. Some months the total charge, between the base $20 and “all” the data, was pushing $60. For pretty low level service and dropping phone calls. That’s a lot of money.
Our first fix was to try to address the hotspot concern. We don’t use a ton of data, but there are times when we need to access it. Uploading blog posts and podcasts, downloading weather. Jeremy has work he needs to do on FastSeas. General research. The occasional YouTube video, either for entertainment or education. Some of this can be done from phones directly; other stuff requires a hotspot to use a computer. Given that both phones were on T-Mobile and that the Google Fi costs were, er, higher than we’d hoped, it stood to reason that we’d look at the Mint plans. Hey, check that out! There’s a plan with unlimited data AND hotspot! And it only costs $30 a month, all in! WHOOO! Okay, you need to sign up for (and pay for) a year up front, but what a deal! And they’d credit me for what I’d already paid. Wins all around!
Not so fast. Hidden (so hidden I didn’t find it until way too late to cancel the plan and get any refund) was the fact that you’re limited to 5 gigs of hotspot data a month. Ugh.
The second challenge was to shoot for a viable second network option, all without paying some really insane amount of money. If we could figure out a way to have good hotspot access, so much the better. Any T-Mobile based plan was out. Sprint has even less coverage. ATT sporadically has some deals, all of which revert to “it costs an arm and a leg each month” pretty fast. Verizon . . . oh. Check this out. Verizon has a second-tier plan called Visible. $40 a month. $25 a month as part of the Party Pay. ($25 a month. Not a typo. Not a limited time offer. OMG!) Unlimited everything, including hotspot. Second-tier means the traffic is not prioritized (if we’re in an area with a lot of demand, our traffic goes to the back of the line), but compared to a “normal” Verizon plan that starts at $70/month PLUS taxes and fees? We don’t need priority traffic so much that we’ll pay double more than TRIPLE the cost.
The rub with the Visible plan was that we needed to buy a new phone because the phone we had didn’t work with Verizon. Fine. A little research, a little investigation, a little soul-searching about what we needed the phone for (to serve as the hotspot, essentially), and $40 later we had a new phone. (Okay, the phone is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW. So slow we occasionally think it’s dead. It’s not. It’s just slow. If the phone rings when it’s asleep, it takes so long to wake up the call has rolled over to voice mail before you can even answer it. Did I mention the phone is slow?)
So where do we stand at the end of 2021? (links are referral links, to be clear. You use, we both benefit.)
1 phone on Mint Mobile, at a cost of $30/month (prepaid). Second-tier T-Mobile network. Unlimited data but very limited hotspot. This expires in May and we’ll see what we decide to do from there.
1 phone on Verizon Visible, at a cost of $25/month (month to month). Second-tier Verizon network. Unlimited data and hotspot. No expiration as it’s month to month. So far, other than the crappy phone we chose, we’re really happy with this. We’re thinking we’ll upgrade to a better phone (with a better camera) that works with Verizon.
Summary: highly recommend having phones on different networks to be reasonably assured of coverage everywhere. Highly recommend that Visible plan. Mint is mixed. Google Fi is mixed.
Going forward? The biggest question will be what happens when we leave the US, which is in the plans for late fall of 2022. These plans are good for US coverage only, though both pay some lip service to international availability. There will be LOTS of fine print reading (and even then I’d be cautious -see the first comment on the original cell phone post for details.) I’d imagine we’ll conduct a lot of research on current options before we make any decisions - all research we can do on our current plans.
at sea, at sunset. Ahhh.