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...