Skirting my cell phone bill
My contract with Sprint is going to end in a couple months, and I'm trying to think of a new way to talk on the go. I just hate paying the large amount of money I spend on my phone, when I rarely ever talk on it. I speak to my wife, and that is about it. All my friends I text, twitter, and facebook all the time. Plus 90% of my time is spent in a wi-fi zone, with a computer nearby. I would love to get into the Republic Wireless Beta, but I don't see that happening. I'm toying with the idea of picking up a used Ipod touch, and getting a mi-fi plan with sprint instead of a phone. It would drop my cost down to about $40 a month and I would get the features of an Ipod touch which is great. Has anyone played around with google voice or skype in conjunction with this setup? I know I would need a blue tooth headset too, and that I'm looking at having to carry three devices instead of one, but it might be worth the loss of convenience to save the cash.
Xbox Live Gamertag - Yoreel
Steam id - [GWJ] Yoreel
My wife and I have a very basic family plan with fairly generic flip phones and she's carrying an iPod touch to handle her smartphone needs for things like appointment tracking, etc. She's also got google voice set up on it and can use that around the house to save on minutes, but it's only good for outgoing calls, as any incoming calls get routed to her phone. Anyway, we're paying $65 or so a month which isn't too bad, given that we have two phone lines on the sprint bill, and it does seem to work well for us.
No idea if that helps or not.
Coldstream wrote:
XBL
Steam
I will throw this out there one more time. I have a plan through Verizon that is unlimited data/email/text with no minutes; I pay $.25 per min if using voice. It is called "Nationwide Messaging Plan with No Voice Minutes". They have them for basic phones or Blackberry/Smartphones; I have a Droid X and pay ~$55mnth.
To find it I did a search on their site for "deaf" and, it was one of the top choices. The rep I talked to in store didn't even know about it when I got it ~2 yrs ago.
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I may have to look into that sort of plan, since my wife just needs voice and texting.
I also looked into the ZTE PEEL, which is a mi-fi case for 2nd and 3rd gen ipod touches. You can get a gig of data a month from sprint for $30 with it, which should be more than enough for the random times I'm without wi-fi. I think that and a skype number and I might be able to make it work. Going to run it by the wife and see what she thinks.
Xbox Live Gamertag - Yoreel
Steam id - [GWJ] Yoreel
There's a new service called Ting that just started last week. It looks pretty awesome to me. Very reasonable prices. There aren't plans per se, you select a target amount of minutes, messages, and megabytes per month and if you're over you get bumped into the higher bracket and if you use less, you get credit for the next month's bill. There's no contracts or anything, either. Downside is you have to buy a phone from them, but it looks like something I'll pursue when my wife's plan is up this fall.
Www.ting.com
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A lot of people don't realize you can do that with contracts too, at least with Verizon. If you go over you can increase your plan for the month, pay the prorated extra cost (but not the overages) and then go back down next month. You can't decrease to save money though. That's a really nice feature.
Steam
Tanglebones wrote:
A T-Mobile Prepaid plan will get you low minutes with unlimited data for $30 a month on 4G. If you used this with any WiFi enabled device whose OS supports Skype, you could use WiFi in most areas, and also have access to data from almost anywhere else, plus a decent voice plan in those rare times when you need it.
AT&T has data-only plans, too - $20 a month for 300MB isn't bad considering you're mostly on Wifi anyway...
Malor wrote:
Google Voice & Virgin Mobile.
PSN: troland; Steam
IIRC, Virgin just leases its lines from Sprint. And you're limited to only the devices they sell.
Malor wrote:
A coworker does almost the same thing but relies on using wifi hotspots rather than a mobile wifi device. It's extremely frustrating when I need to get a hold of him outside of work. As long as you can make sure you're reachable the majority of the time I don't see a problem, but just keep in mind that people need to be able to get a hold of you too
| Steam ID: schrensky |
The website says you need "appropriate documentation", and it's no longer unlimited, just 2GB of data IIRC.
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I was worried about that; there is none required. As for the second part I don't know, I don't use data that much.
"Accuracy by Volume!!!"
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