Exploring Alternate Wireless Plans (Premium)

Because of the work that I do, I often need to test multiple smartphones, and that requires multiple wireless lines and SIMs. Which can get expensive. So I’ve been exploring low-cost alternate wireless plans. And I feel like this is an area for great savings that anyone can enjoy.

I can’t recall where I wrote about this originally, but this year I gradually cut down on my wireless lines in order to save money. This wasn’t really part of our move to Pennsylvania in that I believe I started this process before we decided to move. But the move accelerated my examination of ways in which we could save money, and I completed the process this past Fall.

Long story short, I switched from Verizon to AT&T in mid-2007 in order to use the original iPhone, and I stuck with that network for 10 years. Over time, I moved from an unlimited plan to a capped data plan because I had to, and I added two more lines. But the time 2017 rolled around, I was throwing $135 or so at AT&T every month. I viewed this as part of the cost of doing business. But the monthly charge always rankled me.

It also wasn’t the totality of my monthly wireless fees. In late 2015, I purchased a Nexus 6P from Google and signed up for Project Fi. This service is wonderful on a number of levels—surely you’ve heard me sing its praises—but for almost two years I used it as a secondary (really fourth) wireless line since I was using another device as my primary phone on my primary AT&T phone number/line.

I could have saved some money by pausing Project Fi; that’s only one of the many benefits of this service. But I only did that sporadically. Which meant that my real monthly wireless bill was closer to $165. Which is ridiculous. (And to be clear, this doesn’t include my family’s wireless bill: My wife and two kids are on a Verizon family plan that I assume requires a monthly bleeding of some kind too.)

So I set out to cut back. The first step was to remove the two secondary lines from my AT&T account, which I believe I did sometime in early 2017. That dropped that bill down to about $60-$70 a month, which seems to be about the going rate for an individual plan at the big American wireless carriers. Coupled with Project Fi, my monthly bill was somewhere under $100. Still too expensive.

What I wanted to do was switch entirely to Project Fi. I love this service for its low, pay only for what you use pricing, for its transparency, and because I can use it internationally without any additional costs. (When I was only at AT&T, I often racked up bills of several hundred dollars every time I traveled internationally. Project Fi has been a miracle of savings here.)

But Project Fi has some very obvious issues, the biggest being that it only works with a small selection of mostly Google-designed phones. So this year, I planned to switch to Android and the Pixel 2 XL, and switch to Project Fi, bringing my 10-year-old AT&T phone number to the service in the process. I actually completed this stressful switch in late September, ahead of the Pixel 2 XL launch (I had a 2016-era Pixel XL to use for the interim).

The savings are enormous. My monthly bill from Project Fi has ranged from $22 to $33 over the past three months, a far cry from the $165 or so I was spending during each of the same three months a year ago. Winning, right?

Well, yes. But the reality of my job, part of which involves testing multiple smartphones, means that I need to use those phones on wireless lines too. And I can’t just swap out the Project Fi SIM, which would be tedious even if it did work: That network is designed for certain phones only. So I began exploring low-cost alternates.

And while I am by no means an expert when it comes to these services, and have, in fact, just started exploring them, what I do know so far is interesting and useful enough to benefit others. That is, if you’re currently at one of the big carriers—AT&T or Verizon here in the US, or even T-Mobile or Sprint—chances are you could save a lot of money by looking elsewhere.

I am referring, of course, to pay-as-you-go plans, which come in a variety of forms. Including, even, from some of those same big carriers. Which is interesting. But no matter: Even if you choose a small, no-name carrier, chances are very high—OK, certain—that you will be using the big carrier networks. It’s just that you will probably pay less.

This is an area where I need your help. I’ve looked into a handful of these small carriers, but I bet there are more that I’ve never heard of. So if you use such a service, please let me know. Let’s talk usage and monthly costs.

In the meantime, here’s what I found.

First, I knew that AT&T had a pay-as-you-go service called GoPhone, and I was curious how low-you-could-go, if you will. As it turns out, AT&T has discontinued the GoPhone brand. But the service still exists. Only now it’s called AT&T Prepaid.

What I was looking for initially was a SIM. In other words, for little or no cost per month, could I just get a SIM to put in a phone? And the answer, at AT&T Prepaid, is yes. You have to really dig for this, but I even found one where you could potentially spend $0 per month. This assumes that you do not use the phone at all.

More specifically, AT&T Prepaid offers various plans. The cheapest plan with data costs $35 per month: For that fee, you get 1 GB of data and unlimited talk and text in the US. If you pay $10 more, or $45 per month, you get a very healthy 6 GB of data. That seems like a great deal to me, though you won’t save any money if you use less data. (Which is one of the nice things about Project Fi.)

You have to really dig to find this, but AT&T Prepaid also offers even cheaper plans that do not include monthly data allowances. You could pay $30 per month for just phone and text, and then pay extra for data. You could just pay 25 cents per minute per phone. Or you could choose what I chose: $2 per day only on those days in which you make one or more calls and/or send one or more text messages; once you do that, phone and text is unlimited for the rest of the day.

$2 per day. Nice. The reason this works for me is that I want to put a no-cost SIM in a phone. I don’t need to make phone calls or texts, so I will never pay the fee. This plan is effectively $0 per month, and the SIM is free. The only “issue” is that you have to put some funds in your account so you can keep it active and use it when needed. I paid $25.

Most people reading this will want unlimited phone and text and some amount of data. It’s instructive, I think, to go back and look at how much data you actually used each month for the past year to understand what that number is. That $45 AT&T Prepaid plan I mentioned above is probably a pretty good deal for most; figure it will really cost over $50 per month with taxes and fees.

But what if you need less data? I’ve been researching alternate carriers, or mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), meaning carriers that basically resell bandwidth on the big carriers; Project Fi is a good example, though its Google limitations make it unusable for many. Republic Wireless resells Sprint’s network, which I can’t recommend. But then there’s Ting, which has advertised in the past on Windows Weekly. (No, I’m not selling you on an advertiser; this was a long time ago and I get nothing if you sign-up.)

Ting is very interesting for a number of reasons. It can utilize the networks for both Sprint and T-Mobile, for starters. And it is low-cost: The company claims that its average bill is just $23 per month. That is Project Fi territory (minus the international advantages).

Using Ting’s rate calculator, you can see how much it would cost to use this service. For one person with 100 minutes (or less) of calls, 100 (or fewer) text messages, and 2 GB of data, the cost would be $32 per month.

There’s no contract, of course, and you can bring your own phone. And that is interesting to me because I just purchased a SIM-free and unlocked iPhone X. That device is compatible with both CDMA (Sprint) and GSM (T-Mobile) networks, and in verifying (via the device’s IMEI number) that it is compatible, I was told that this particular phone will actually switch between whatever the best network is at any time, CDMA or GSM. That’s very Project Fi like.

So I ordered a SIM. It wasn’t free—it was $9 plus shipping—but cheap enough. And because I will never need to make phone calls or texts, and will just put a small amount of data on there, my monthly fee could be as little as $9 per month ($3 for 100 MB of data plus $6 in taxes and fees). 2 GB of data would only cost $26 per month.

So I will test these things and see if the math and the services work out. But I’m curious: What you do you use? And what do you pay for that usage? I’m guessing there are other ways to save money here.