Ask Slashdot: Is It Worth Being Grandfathered On Verizon's Unlimited Data Plan?

An anonymous reader writes I understand a lot of people dislike Verizon in general, but assuming for a moment that they were your only option for a cellular service provider, is staying on their grandfathered unlimited data plan still worth it? Their recent announcement to not throttle traffic is inpiring, but I just don't know the long-term benefits of staying on this plan. I fear there is a tipping point where enough people will swap over to a metered plan and Verizon will ultimately abandon the unlimited altogether and assume the risk of losing a percentage of those remaining folks, at which point all of us who bought unsubsidized phones will have wasted the money doing so. Does anyone have any insight on this? Useful answers to this should take into account the problem with the question of "How long is a piece of string?" Give some context about how much you pay, and how much you use -- and how much that would change if the price were different.

Comments

Re:Boost mobile

[AvitarX]

I'd rather do Tmobile $35.00 plan, only 100 minutes, but the same otherwise (I think it's 5gb).

I recently switched and saved $60/month

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a hold out. I purchased at full price my Samsung S4 ($700 with taxes) and my wife's iPhone 5S ($800 with taxes). I calculated that the break even point was about 2.5 years. Then my wife wanted text messaging that we had turned off to save money. Then Verizon reduced the cost of their data plans. I looked at my data usage and saw that it was low. I turned on wifi on both phones and my data usage dropped. I called one night and asked if there were any promotions to get me to switch. After promotions of $10 month/line for paying full price for the phones and choosing a low data usage plan, I saved $60 a month. The few months I go over, will still be cheaper than keeping the unlimited plan. Did I make a mistake? Only time will tell.

Unlimited = No Sharing

[unfortunateson]

The two big catches with the unlimited plan are
(a) you can't buy a discounted phone (which someone above has already mentioned)
but the big one is
(b) you can't hotspot or share the account with other devices

(a) is less of a problem these days: There really aren't discounted phones, just installment payment plans. And I got my latest phone from a relative who's an exec at Verizon (no, I can't get you one too)
(b) is nearly a dealbreaker. I don't like touchscreen typing, so any message more than two lines long I want to use my laptop or tablet keyboard for... but I can't if I'm not in a free wifi zone. Is it worth losing unlimited to be able to occasionally tether? Maybe. At one point there were apps that would let you tether without rooting the phone, outside of the provider's knowledge, then they stopped working, maybe they work again.

Anyone have experience with non-root tether apps on Android?

Re:T-Mobile

[rsborg]

There's no downside to T-Mobile. There's no contract, no overage fees, no nonsense. If they have LTE coverage in your city, check them out.

I second this. I also benefited from only paying $40 for using my phone as normal while traveling in France - making calls to the US, making calls to my relatives - for 2 1/2 weeks - and the bill was only $40 more... oh and that's for both me and my wife.

Also I don't have bill anxiety anymore - with AT&T and Verizon, every month I was checking my bill to see if my wife's data quota went over (she refused to pay for 2-3GB, and insisted on the 250MB plan) or if one of my calls went over my monthly quota or if my wife accidentally called her mom's mobile number instead of her home number in France (big rate difference).

Now I pay +$15/mo per line and can call mobile numbers in Europe for free. No worrying about anything. My bill has been constant for the past year and much less than we were paying with either AT&T or Verizon (oh, and we have 3 more lines for relatives on the bill too).

T-mobile has disrupted mobile carriers like Google disrupted webmail in 2004 with GMail.