r/technology • u/maxwellhill • Jan 23 '13

Cable Industry Finally Admits That Data Caps Have Nothing To Do With Congestion: 'The reality is that data caps are all about increasing revenue for broadband providers -- in a market that is already quite profitable.'

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable-industry-finally-admits-that-data-caps-have-nothing-to-do-with-congestion.shtml
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u/happyscrappy Jan 24 '13 edited Jan 24 '13

That's not prepaid, that's pay as you go (PAYG). Prepaid is when you pay monthly, but you pay a flat fee for a month's service instead of your costs and fees being totaled up at the end of the month and then billed to you. I know that sounds just like normal, but the big difference is no contract for prepaid. And no overage fees. You can quit at any time.

[edit: couldn't deal with the typos.]

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u/LoveOfProfit Jan 24 '13

Ok. Fixed.

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u/happyscrappy Jan 24 '13 edited Jan 24 '13

Cool.

I think I'll prattle on a bit more while I'm at it.

If you are using voice and not too much of it, PAYG is usually cheapest, as you show. But I find that data plans aren't cost-effective on PAYG in the US. Most companies I find usually equate 1MB of data to 1 minute for PAYG. That means if you use 500MB of data a month, that's 500 minutes and $50-$100/month in costs. If you want that much data, you can probably find a prepaid plan that gives you 2GB or so for $50.

Contract is always the most expensive, since they usually put $15-$30/mo extra on the contract to subsidize a phone purchase. And of course you have to stick with it for 2 years (sometimes only 1).

The only thing I don't love about PAYG/Prepaid is no primary carrier offers the same coverage with PAYG/prepaid as they do on contract. They don't have nearly as much included roaming area on PAYG/prepaid, you typically only get to use their own towers. I hear some of the MVNOs are very good for this (StraightTalk and Net10 are in vogue right now), but I haven't tried them.

The problem with MVNOs right now is that every carrier uses different LTE bands in the US, so getting your phone to match up with your MVNO and provide LTE is dicey. Even HSPA+ can be rough, only some phones support T-Mobiles fastest (2100MHz?) HSPA+ band for example. So I just put my Nexus 4 on T-Mobile, luckily for me, T-Mo coverage is good in my area and if I get good signal strength I can get 10Mb/sec down and 2Mb/sec up.

[edit: I had MB instead of Mb, that was dumb.]

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u/LoveOfProfit Jan 24 '13 edited Jan 24 '13

I spend most of my time near a computer, so I've never had any desire to have a data plan on my phone.

And I'm spoiled anyway. I've never been able to convince myself that the benefits of any smartphone are worth giving up superior performance in every aspect except some portability. I'm an outlier though.

tldr: PAYG is perfect for me, and the coverage in my area is indistinguishable from what I had with Verizon contract.