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For Data, How do you get by without being on T-Mobile?

eyoungren said:
Coming from a perspective of metered data or throttling at a certain point if you have a UD plan that throttles I can get your point.

Most of my data is on WiFi, but that's not because I choose to use WiFi. It's because Sprint's coverage and speeds suck now. But that was not always the case.

I didn't have to take to WiFi until September 2012. For three and a half years we never had any issues on 3G and despite having WiFi at home and other places we stayed on cellular data.

Right now I pay Sprint $211 a month to use the WiFi I have at home that I ALREADY pay Cox $232 for. I'm not getting what I am paying for.


If I solely used WiFi everywhere and turned off cellular so there was no data use at all when off WiFi then I'd be paying Sprint that much money for what now? Phone calls?

No, I'm paying Sprint for unlimited data (they take $20 a month in premium data fees whether I use data or not anyway), not for the use of paid or free WiFi (such as at Starbucks or work).
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The ironic thing about this situation (and one I sympathize with) is that now I use a lot of WiFi because with AT&T I have limited data, and when I was on T-Mo I used a lot of WiFi because I kept losing signal. Sure in a perfect world I'd have T-Mo's data plans with AT&T speeds and coverage, but that ain't the world we live in.

That said, I have no idea what in the holy hell you're talking about at the end. Why are you paying $211 to Sprint for unlimited data? 20GB for four lines is $100/mo. The heck are you doing with your plan? $20 a month in premium data fees? Why are you paying for that?
 
SomeGuyDude said:
The ironic thing about this situation (and one I sympathize with) is that now I use a lot of WiFi because with AT&T I have limited data, and when I was on T-Mo I used a lot of WiFi because I kept losing signal. Sure in a perfect world I'd have T-Mo's data plans with AT&T speeds and coverage, but that ain't the world we live in.

That said, I have no idea what in the holy hell you're talking about at the end. Why are you paying $211 to Sprint for unlimited data? 20GB for four lines is $100/mo. The heck are you doing with your plan? $20 a month in premium data fees? Why are you paying for that?
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I'm on an Everything Data 1500 family plan. $110 for the first line, $19.99 for the second line. 2 iPhones, each charged $10 for premium data and $11 for TEP (insurance). I also pay $20 for a 2GB hotspot. Plus taxes and fees it totals around $211 a month.

I've had this plan since Christmas 2008. You can no longer get the ED plans. But I stayed on it because I was not willing to work for Sprint to get a discount by moving over to Framily. Then came the All In/MyWay plans. Both of those plans replaced the ED plans but are more EXPENSIVE for LESS than 5 lines.

Then Claure came in and killed UD for family plans. You can only get it on an individual plan now. I'm expecting to move to T-Mobile in the new year (I've had enough) so I'm not signing up for a new metered family plan and I'm not going through the hassle of trying to get one family plan split into two individual UD plans.

As to the premium data fee, it was a fee introduced by Sprint in early 2009 for the HTC EVO 4G. Sprint called it the 4G fee and it only applied to the HTC EVO. Within microseconds of calling it the 4G fee, Sprint retracted their statement and labeled it a "premium data fee" because the implication was originally that it only applied to when you were using 4G and Sprint intended to apply it to ALL data, whether you used it or not.

That fee became permanent for Sprint smartphones in late 2009. Sprint killed the fee when it introduced the MyWay and All In plans (they rolled it into the cost of the plan, like they should have done with the old plans). I avoided the fee for three and a half years because we were grandfathered in because we had phones that were sold to us BEFORE the fee. But, once we got iPhones we got hit with the fee because we are on an old plan.

So…believe it or not, moving to T-Mobile's most expensive UD plan is actually going to be a price cut for us.

EDIT: Oh yeah. One of the other reasons I stay on this now more expensive plan is because Sprint cannot "optimize" my connection (they only do that on the new plans) and my roaming data allotment is higher.

Sprint's optimization is two-fold. They throttle you when you connect to a congested tower if you are in the top five percent of data consumers and if you stream video past 1GB they reduce the quality of the video stream.

Because I am on an old plan I am not subject to any of this.
 
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nouveau-apple said:
T-Mobile appears to be the only carrier with unlimited LTE. Everyone else caps you or has you paying too much, but they also don't offer unlimited. My first month on T-Mobile I used 20GB. The month wasn't even up yet. And that was just me using it casually.

So then I started thinking, why was I ever on ATT? It only offers like 5GB. They seem to divvy it out. :/ ?
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Unlimited Edge around here and the bulk of there network is edge so it's only really an option for those who don't travel and live in the city
 
M-F for 8-9 hours a day, I am at work, which has Wifi throughout the entire campus.

Weekends, I'm on LTE for most of the day, but other than streaming music, I'm not on my phone all the time during the weekend that requires large amounts of bandwidth. Additionally, some of the places I go to on the weekends have wifi (friends & family homes), even some restaurants and malls I go to have wifi.

Nights I'm at home and I'm on wifi.
 
eyoungren said:
I'm on an Everything Data 1500 family plan. $110 for the first line, $19.99 for the second line. 2 iPhones, each charged $10 for premium data and $11 for TEP (insurance). I also pay $20 for a 2GB hotspot. Plus taxes and fees it totals around $211 a month.

I've had this plan since Christmas 2008. You can no longer get the ED plans. But I stayed on it because I was not willing to work for Sprint to get a discount by moving over to Framily. Then came the All In/MyWay plans. Both of those plans replaced the ED plans but are more EXPENSIVE for LESS than 5 lines.

Then Claure came in and killed UD for family plans. You can only get it on an individual plan now. I'm expecting to move to T-Mobile in the new year (I've had enough) so I'm not signing up for a new metered family plan and I'm not going through the hassle of trying to get one family plan split into two individual UD plans.

As to the premium data fee, it was a fee introduced by Sprint in early 2009 for the HTC EVO 4G. Sprint called it the 4G fee and it only applied to the HTC EVO. Within microseconds of calling it the 4G fee, Sprint retracted their statement and labeled it a "premium data fee" because the implication was originally that it only applied to when you were using 4G and Sprint intended to apply it to ALL data, whether you used it or not.

That fee became permanent for Sprint smartphones in late 2009. Sprint killed the fee when it introduced the MyWay and All In plans (they rolled it into the cost of the plan, like they should have done with the old plans). I avoided the fee for three and a half years because we were grandfathered in because we had phones that were sold to us BEFORE the fee. But, once we got iPhones we got hit with the fee because we are on an old plan.

So…believe it or not, moving to T-Mobile's most expensive UD plan is actually going to be a price cut for us.

EDIT: Oh yeah. One of the other reasons I stay on this now more expensive plan is because Sprint cannot "optimize" my connection (they only do that on the new plans) and my roaming data allotment is higher.

Sprint's optimization is two-fold. They throttle you when you connect to a congested tower if you are in the top five percent of data consumers and if you stream video past 1GB they reduce the quality of the video stream.

Because I am on an old plan I am not subject to any of this.
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Ahhh, Americon telecoms are wonderful. :eek:
 
I couldn't make it on AT&T or Verizon because they could never get me LTE data where I live here in Denver. T-Mobile is the only one who can do that and because of that, I will always have unlimited data. I pay $77 per month and have never been happier with a carrier as I am with T-Mobile.

I've used as much as 75GB and never heard a word from T-Mobile.
 
eyoungren said:
Yeah, I get that. That's a CDMA limitation. Verizon has managed to work around it, but Sprint still has a ways to go.
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Unless something has changed that I'm unaware of, even Verizon iPhones drop LTE data when they get a phone call since there's no third antenna to dedicate to a data connection.
 
Its funny how our perspective of data has changed. Unlimited was the norm, now if we get 5gb, we are amazed. It's pathetic. Pisses me off. What the heck we are going to do when we are going to stream 4k videos?
 
eyoungren said:
Coming from a perspective of metered data or throttling at a certain point if you have a UD plan that throttles I can get your point.

Most of my data is on WiFi, but that's not because I choose to use WiFi. It's because Sprint's coverage and speeds suck now. But that was not always the case.

I didn't have to take to WiFi until September 2012. For three and a half years we never had any issues on 3G and despite having WiFi at home and other places we stayed on cellular data.

Right now I pay Sprint $211 a month to use the WiFi I have at home that I ALREADY pay Cox $232 for. I'm not getting what I am paying for.


If I solely used WiFi everywhere and turned off cellular so there was no data use at all when off WiFi then I'd be paying Sprint that much money for what now? Phone calls?

No, I'm paying Sprint for unlimited data (they take $20 a month in premium data fees whether I use data or not anyway), not for the use of paid or free WiFi (such as at Starbucks or work).
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His point is simple. He has no reason to pay for unlimited when he has wifi everywhere. I am in the same boat. I dropped unlimited because I no longer needed it. I've saved somewhere around $400 (doing some really quick numbers) over that time. My unimited data plan was not an advantage because I was paying more than what I needed for it.

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Bearxor said:
Unless something has changed that I'm unaware of, even Verizon iPhones drop LTE data when they get a phone call since there's no third antenna to dedicate to a data connection.
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This is correct.
 
Yeah, I get that. I was just saying that if you are paying for UD, why use WiFi.

If you don't have UD for whatever reason then that is much less of an issue.
 
abe7333 said:
Its funny how our perspective of data has changed. Unlimited was the norm, now if we get 5gb, we are amazed. It's pathetic. Pisses me off. What the heck we are going to do when we are going to stream 4k videos?
Click to expand...

I don't think data will be priced the same way forever. It's a bit like texting. It was free when it first began. Then carriers realized they could capitalize and started charging for it. They started selling packages, then unlimited, now they roll it into their minutes plans (there are exceptions, but I am talking about the most popular plans here).

Data seems to be following the same trend. At first it was unlimted (not free, but it was always part of a smartphone plan... if you had a smartphone you just paid for the "I am on a smartphone" package and it was unlimited. Then they started offering lesser packages for those who claimed they didn't need to drop $30 a month when they only used a couple hundred mb. Then they got unlimited packages. Now there is quite a bit of competition between carriers as to how many gigs of data to offer for how much. Things will even out. They are already following trends that we have already seen in the past.

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eyoungren said:
Yeah, I get that. I was just saying that if you are paying for UD, why use WiFi.

If you don't have UD for whatever reason then that is much less of an issue.
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During peak hours I would still hop on wifi. I was attending university at the time and there was literally a wifi hotspot every couple hundred feet. Most of them had the same name so my devices never had to "learn" them. I would pull 100+ megabit at all times. In short, my wifi connection was just leaps and bounds better most of the time. :)
 
lordofthereef said:
During peak hours I would still hop on wifi. I was attending university at the time and there was literally a wifi hotspot every couple hundred feet. Most of them had the same name so my devices never had to "learn" them. I would pull 100+ megabit at all times. In short, my wifi connection was just leaps and bounds better most of the time. :)
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LOL! That's the funny thing though. When I'm in an area with good Sprint coverage, LTE is faster than WiFi.

I understand that PHX is T-Mobile's market (meaning they do really well here) so once I switch WiFi will just be for my laptops.

I just wish, looking back, that Sprint 3G had been this bad years ago. I would have taken the opportunity to switch earlier.
 
eyoungren said:
LOL! That's the funny thing though. When I'm in an area with good Sprint coverage, LTE is faster than WiFi.

I understand that PHX is T-Mobile's market (meaning they do really well here) so once I switch WiFi will just be for my laptops.

I just wish, looking back, that Sprint 3G had been this bad years ago. I would have taken the opportunity to switch earlier.
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I would axtually go with Tmobile if it was an option. Tried it. Reception was terrible despite maps (and even some posters here) claiming the contrary. I do appreciate what they have been doing to keep the market competitive though.
 
lordofthereef said:
I would axtually go with Tmobile if it was an option. Tried it. Reception was terrible despite maps (and even some posters here) claiming the contrary. I do appreciate what they have been doing to keep the market competitive though.
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Yeah. We are the perfect customers for it though. A lot of Sprint users bash T-Mobile for being edge speeds outside of citys, but we leave PHX metro maybe once a year. So we expect to pretty much always be in good coverage.
 
I wish I had t mobile. The only reason for that is the free music streaming although it would still make me leery that it would count towards my data. That would also skew the data usage in settings-> cellular.
Now back on topic, I personally am fine with my 10GB on AT&T. I usually am on wifi so it's not really a problem. I usually use 3 GB conservatively.
 
Coverage permitting, T-Mobile is easily the best route to go. But until they finish upgrading their EDGE areas to LTE late summer 2015, there are still a significant number of people who are unable to use their service.

Fortunately for me the coverage is great here. Get to use my iPhone without worries of counting MBs, getting throttled, or being afraid to use certain apps.
 
nouveau-apple said:
T-Mobile appears to be the only carrier with unlimited LTE. Everyone else caps you or has you paying too much, but they also don't offer unlimited. My first month on T-Mobile I used 20GB. The month wasn't even up yet. And that was just me using it casually.

So then I started thinking, why was I ever on ATT? It only offers like 5GB. They seem to divvy it out. :/ ?
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Do you, like, have no internet at home but your T-Mobile?

I use my data without worrying about usage and I never go over about 8 GB. I average closer to 5.
 
bunnicula said:
Do you, like, have no internet at home but your T-Mobile?

I use my data without worrying about usage and I never go over about 8 GB. I average closer to 5.
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Why are we paying for data if it isn't meant to be used? It doesn't matter if we have home internet.

I never turn my 5S on WiFi, it's always on LTE.
 
Bearxor said:
Unless something has changed that I'm unaware of, even Verizon iPhones drop LTE data when they get a phone call since there's no third antenna to dedicate to a data connection.
Click to expand...
Its not about a third antenna, its that there is not a separate radio to handle data while on a call. Verizon LTE Android phones have been able to do both for quite a while, except for a couple of the brand new phones now like the Droid Turbo since they are pushing VoLTE
 
JackieInCo said:
Why are we paying for data if it isn't meant to be used? It doesn't matter if we have home internet.

I never turn my 5S on WiFi, it's always on LTE.
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Do you do NOTHING on a home network? If for no other reason I'd be keeping my phone on WiFi so I can do things like control my Chromecast via the phone or print documents wirelessly.

Also, with the handoff feature, if your phone and computer aren't on the same network you won't be getting texts in Yosemite so that's kinda important. Like, there are a LOT of benefits to having your phone and computer on the WiFi.
 
SomeGuyDude said:
Do you do NOTHING on a home network? If for no other reason I'd be keeping my phone on WiFi so I can do things like control my Chromecast via the phone or print documents wirelessly.

Also, with the handoff feature, if your phone and computer aren't on the same network you won't be getting texts in Yosemite so that's kinda important. Like, there are a LOT of benefits to having your phone and computer on the WiFi.
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I get 60Mbps on my ISPs internet. I use that for either streaming iTunes movies or TV shows to my Apple TV or other things. Again, I have no reason to use WiFi when I get 40Mbps on my T-Mobile phone and i have unlimited data.

I'm running Mavericks on my Mini so I'm not worried about hand off or anything of that nonsense.
 
JackieInCo said:
I get 60Mbps on my ISPs internet. I use that for either streaming iTunes movies or TV shows to my Apple TV or other things. Again, I have no reason to use WiFi when I get 40Mbps on my T-Mobile phone and i have unlimited data.

I'm running Mavericks on my Mini so I'm not worried about hand off or anything of that nonsense.
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Yes, nonsense indeed. Stupid convenience, how nonsensical. :rolleyes:
 
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