I have the $30/month T-Mobile prepaid 100 minutes with 5GB data plan, and for the first time, I've hit the 5GB cap. The throttled speed just isn't usable, which I sort of expected, so I looked to see what other prepaid plans T-Mobile has. Unfortunately, it looks like the next tier up after 5GB is unlimited, which costs $80. For that price, I could buy two of the $30 plans and have $20 left over.

So... Is there anything stopping me from doing exactly that? Sure, I'd have to swap SIM cards and deal with a different phone number, but with Google Voice and such, nobody knows my actual number (I only know it so I can log into the T-Mobile website.) I barely go over the 100 minute mark, and if I do, the $0.10/minute rate is still cheaper than paying $80 for a base plan.

I'm going to start looking into ways to reduce my data usage, perhaps cutting down the quality of my Google Music streaming, etc. but I was thinking if I'm still going over the cap regularly, buying a second plan might be more cost-effective than coughing up $80 for their unlimited everything.

Is this a silly idea?

What about having a MiFi on contract, or even pay as you go?

May also be useful for use with a laptop or tablet while you are out and about.

Certainly better than swapping sims all the time.

Cheers

Cris

I'd be curious to know if the throttled performance with the 5GB prepaid plan is any different than the throttled performance with the 3GB post-paid plan (the one that I'm on, and which supports conditional call forwarding, for make benefit glorious Google Voicemail services). I suspect they're the same.

Cris's MiFi idea might be a great way to go, particularly if you can populate it with one of those pre-paid 5GB/mo SIM cards. Then, you've got your extra bandwidth that you can easily switch to and share with others.

The throttling is 2G speeds, or so they say. I haven't done a speed test, but I can't stream Google Music, even on low quality, and web browsing is torturous even on relatively mobile-friendly sites.

I did think about the Mi-Fi thing, but then I figured that's just another piece of hardware I have to deal with. On the other hand, since I do end up using a lot of my streaming bandwidth in the car, I suppose I could just leave it in the car and just use it when driving. I'd probably struggle to cross the 5GB boundary on my phone if I had another 5GB to use in the car.

It looks like the Mifi plans are $30 for 5GB, plus the cost of the device. It jumps to $50 for 7GB, but since I'm only now crossing the 5GB limit with less than a week to go in my billing cycle, I don't think I'd need more than my phone's 5GB plus the MiFi's 5GB.

The upside with the Mifi is that the voice SIMs on the $30 prepaid plan are limited to a paltry 100MB of "wireless hotspot" service, so I'd be able to use the whole 5GB when I need to tether (which isn't very often.) I could probably engage in some countermeasures on my laptop to hide my traffic from their tethering detection -- change User-agent strings and so forth -- but that's annoying.

The downside vs. the two voice SIMs plan is that I don't get the extra 100 minutes of voice service for the months when I do go over.

All in all, maybe Mifi is the way to go. Anyone have recommendations for a cheap Mifi device?

Sounds like the MiFi is definitely the way to go. I didn't know they had such inexpensive plans for those. Not bad!

Are you certain it's Google Music that's taking up the most data? Have you checked the phone's logs?

I feel your pain, though. I just hit my cap for the first time this month (thankfully I hit the end of my billing cycle in a day or two). It's helpful having Android's data usage by app so I can see what's taking up the most data. This month, for example, it was the app I use for monitoring my surveillance cameras at home. Apparently it was receiving tremendous amounts of data.

Usually, my biggest data hog is my podcatcher. That one is easily fixed by downloading only over WiFi, but I usually don't have an issue of reaching my cap, so I don't worry about it. It was just this past month that was annoying.

Yeah, it's definitely Google Music. There was some Slingboxing in there but not too much. Don't remember the numbers offhand but Google Music was the top draw.

Unfortunately, I'm not seeing anything good in the way of 4G LTE hotspots available on Amazon. T-Mobile wants $120-$168 for their devices depending on which model, and their website doesn't really say what differentiates them. Having to pay $150ish for a device significantly negates the cost-effectiveness of the Mifi plan, at least for the next couple years, and by that time we'll be on 7G or whatever and the device will be obsolete.

Now I'm thinking the two voice SIMs approach may be the winner.

As long as you don't think you'll wear out the SIM drawer...

I'm still pretty surprised that Google Music is taking up that much bandwidth. How much time do you spend streaming that, on average?

Not a lot actually -- maybe 30 minutes a day on average, if that? And some of that I was listening to songs I'd pinned to my device. I did have it turned up to the highest quality, though... Still, the data usage seems excessive.



One thing that might be relevant is that I did have the "cache during playback" feature turned on, so maybe it was downloading entire songs even when I skipped in the first few seconds. (Not really loving Google's "I'm feeling lucky" algorithm -- Pandora it is not.)

I've disabled the cache during streaming option and will be monitoring my daily usage more closely once my billing cycle rolls over.

Rather than two SIMs, why not switch to a Straight Talk unlimited everything plan with a T-Mobile SIM for $42.50/mo? (with autopay discount).

EDIT: Nevermind, it appears it's throttled after 3Gig.

Much of my mp3 collection is encoded at about 128Kbits/sec (yeah, I know). That works out to about 1MByte/minute of play time. So.. 30 minutes gives 30MByte/day, times thirty days, is about 1GByte/month.

If you are skipping through tracks, or using higher quality encodings, then just multiply by 2 or 3, and there it is.

Cheers

Yeah, I did the same math, but I guess I didn't expect the cache files during streaming option to pull down the whole damn track before I can even skip. I like the idea of caching the whole file in case I hit spotty reception while playing, but it'd be nice if it was more intelligent about only getting the first 30s or so until it knows you're not skipping the track.

Alternately, they could use a recommendation algorithm that doesn't suck.

Ah, I didn't know you were using their recommendations. Yeah, those are pretty terrible. To be fair, I've often found Pandora to be pretty terrible too. Then again, at no point in my life have I ever liked radio, so the entire idea of having songs suggested to me is unappealing.

Anyway, I think you're on to something with the idea that it's caching songs you're skipping. I'm also curious about that background data usage. I'm not sure how they calculate that. Is it usually when another app has the focus? I would think that background data usage would be for things like pinning songs, which should probably be done over WiFi, but I don't know.

I've been using rdio for a long time now, and I've never hit my monthly data limit. I always thought that rdio's bitrate was pretty good, but maybe Google's bitrate is better?

Just a thought, might be better off splurging for a 64GB microSD card and manually load your music library on there. It'll save you tons on monthly data usage, plus the app will actually play albums gaplessly.

Excellent thought, though I believe Tony has a Nexus 5 which doesn't have an SD card slot.

Uncarrier 6.0. T-Mobile no longer deducts data from the monthly bucket when using one of the following music streaming services. Pandora, Rhapsody, iHeart Radio, iTunes Radio, Milk, Beatport, Slacker.

http://t-mobile.com/musicfreedom to vote for which service should be added next. I'll pitch in a vote on the Google Music option for you Tony.

Nice! Definitely Google Music. Or, depending on how Google rearranges their use of IP addresses, you could end up with "Free Google Everything" (navigation, YouTube, etc.). That would be extra bonus.

On the flip side, where does this play in the "net neutrality" universe? As a user, I'm now incentivized to use one of the "free bandwidth" music services versus an upstart competitor wherein I'd need to pay for more bandwidth.

Yeah, it's sad that we have to navigate all these special agreements with different services, but it's also kind of shocking to see Google Music not included. I get that it's only slightly more popular than some of the smaller niche services on the list already, but one would think Google would want to work with T-Mo to make sure their service was included from day one.

T-Mobile just added Google Play Music:

http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/24/t-mobile-music-freedom-google-play-music/?ncid=rss_truncated

if i ever lose my unlimited (sprint) plan, i think this is gonna be the winner.

Sweeeeeeeet.

Yeah, I just switched from my $30 plan to a family plan and now I only have 1GB/month so I'm going to have to seriously manage my data. Fortunately I think I'll be fine. I'll download podcasts over WiFi, handle photo/video auto uploads to Dropbox/Google+ over WiFi, and after those the next biggest data users for me was rdio and Play music. I don't think I'll have a problem staying under 1GB, strangely.

Matt, might want to get clarification non the 1GB limit. The plan descriptions seem to imply only LTE is capped at 1GB, then after that your speed gets throttled.

http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/family.html

"Unlimited talk, text & data while on our network
Up to 1 GB of 4G LTE data (Speeds reduced after 1 GB)"


Edit: I see, after hitting 1GB they drop you down to G2, which is almost worthless, IMHO.

Yup, and yup!

This is how TMobile has run their "unlimited" plans for years. You can use an infinite amount of data, but most of it will be at speeds so slow as to be worthless. I guess you can technically get text-based emails over that, which would really be the most important thing for me, but yes for the most part it's worthless.

TMobile actually got in a bit of trouble recently, because apparently the only thing they wouldn't throttle after you reached your limit were speed tests. You would run a speed test and it would show you 4G speeds. This is clearly misleading for the customer (even though the customer should understand their contract better).

For the moment, I'm paying anotehr $10/month so my line can have a 3GB cap. That's actually not that bad, and I rarely hit that amount in the past year. I'll hit it even less often now that rdio won't count against my cap (hooray for potential net neutrality violations!), and now that I've told my podcast client to only download shows over WiFi.

Puttering around internationally with my T-Mobile "free roaming" (also at those throttled 2G speeds), I'm impressed. Things like email, Maps and Navigation are entirely usable. Sure, surfing the web kinda sucks, but it does the job.

T-Mobile will spam you with SMS messages while you're roaming to say "gosh, you know, you can pay us some money and make it go faster." I suspect they do the same thing if you're domestic and you run over your pre-paid 4G quota.

Needless to say, I'll take those spammy SMS messages any day rather than nasty overage charges.

FWIW, about a year ago T-Mobile switched us to their unlimited high speed data family plan, and from what I can tell it's the real deal. A couple of months ago I topped 11 GB of usage and never noticed any throttling. I'll keep a closer eye, though, just in case.

I don't know the usage details of the other phone(s) in your family plan, but T-Mobile is about to do 2 lines unlimited (each with 5GB tethering) for $100. $40 per line after the initial two. Seems like something to consider switching to if you're paying $60 for 3GB now.

News:
http://www.tmonews.com/2014/12/t-mobile-...4-for-100-deal/

Thanks for letting me know, Rob. I'll look at that and see if it makes sense financially. I need four lines, though, and my current plan only costs $10/line after the first two, versus $40 for that one...

*edit*
That's $10/month for 1GB of data, but the other lines don't need unlimited, or more than 1GB.

They've also brought back their family plan with 4 lines for $100 with 2.5GB per line.

Seriously? Awesome!

It kind of annoys me that they stopped that plan for the month that I signed up for their service, but at least it's back so I'll be switching to that. It's the plan I'd wanted all along anyway, and if I need more data on my line I'll just add another $10/month to the bill.

Thanks for letting me know!

I was checking it out the other day, and they let you mix and match data plan limits. For example you can set one line as unlimited and the other 3 as 1GB: $80 + $30 + $10 + $10 = $130. http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/family.html