prepare for a brain dump
21 Nov
Right now I’m on Sprint. After getting my new Acer Aspire One (AA1) super-mobile mini laptop, I went to sprint and upgraded my Pantech PX-500 broadband data card to a Sierra Wireless USB broadband data card. Normally the card is $249.99 but I got it for $0 by extending my plan 2 years.
My 3G data plan through Sprint costs $59.99/mo. I know, that’s an insane amount for a broadband Internet connection, and it’s not going to appeal to many people, but here’s why having a broadband data service is useful to me:
With a broadband data service, I can get very fast connections practically everywhere I can get phone service. That means I can be sitting on a bench in a park and be updating blogs, managing web sites, sending emails, and generally being fully mobile. Combined with my 6-cell AA1, which lasts up to 6 hours on battery, and is extrenely light (under 3lbs), you can imagine I can spend a whole day working fairly easily just about anywhere I choose too.
OK, so what does this have to do with my not getting an iPhone?
Well, I also have a data plan on my smartphone, which is $15/mo for unlimited access, at the same speed as my data card. Guess how much unlimited on AT&T costs? $35/mo. Ouch. So those of you surfing “unlimited” on iPhones, you’re paying $20/mo more than me. That’s not the worst of it. My data plan on Sprint is unlimited for $59.99. How much does unlimited on AT&T cost? Well, there is no unlimited on AT&T. They charge $60/mo and include 5GB (gigabytes) data transfer with their plan and, after that, they charge $0.00048/KB.
Hm, doesn’t sound like much extra but here’s some math for you:
If you used 10GB worth of bandwidth (5GB over what’s included in the plan), you would pay:
5 x 1000 x 1024 x $0.00048 = $2,457.60.
OUCH
That’s kind of expensive for 5GB.
So some of you might say “OK, then I’ll get the $35 ‘unlimited’ data plan for my iPhone and use the iPhone as a modem. Aha!”. Um, no. AT&T has a “tethered” plan (what they call using your phone as a modem), which is $65/mo, which sounds a little better than my $15 + $59.99, but there’s still that nasty little $0.00048/KB “fine print”. If you use either option in Canada, it gets worse, AT&T charges just a little more than 3x more. So if I had either of those plan options, traveled up to Canada, and downloaded 5GB worth of data above what’s included, I would be slammed with a whopping $7,200 bill the next month.
Apparently it costs AT&T $60 + $7,200 to send you a DVD’s worth of data over their 3G network if you happen to be in Canada. So if I had a Netflix account for $4.99 and happened to want to download a DVD movie to watch in my hotel room, Netflix would charge me $4.99 and AT&T would charge me $7,219.20.
So, as you can see, $59.99/mo doesn’t sound so bad after all.
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