Quick question: I'm looking into getting out of my wife and my AT&T iPhone plans and getting PlatinumTel's $40/mo. unlimited plan. My concern is regarding data speed. The website says the first 250MB of data is "high speed"; do you know what that means and what the speed is after you go over that initial 250MB?
I'm considering using the PlatinumTel plan for a while before making a further jump down to Airvoice $10/mo. plan + FreedomPop.
Thanks!
The speed cut is a reduction to EDGE 2G data speeds (a little faster than dial-up). The thing is, until later this year in most markets, that's all you're going to get in speed on the T-Mobile network with iPhones anyway due to 3G HSPA GSM band incompatibility between them and AT&T. The speed is
more than sufficient for most communications data like e-mail and text messages and whatnot, but anything heavily graphics intensive will be slower. Online GPS will be difficult, but not impossible, and there's
offline maps available to cut down on data usage anyway. It'll pretty much just tank streaming media. If a desktop can handle only using 3Mbps down or slower, your mobile phone can handle 64kbps down or slower... and truthfully, you'll kind of
want slower data speeds if you want to reduce data usage and reliance anyway.
If you feel it necessary to fall into the "unlimited" trap and don't mind the slower data speeds, you'll get cheaper through T-Mobile's own
GoSmart Mobile who has a $35/month "unlimited" everything that just default runs the data at the slower speed. The reason why Platinumtel's bundles are a bit more costly is due to their inclusion of international SMS as a default part of the plan. If you add that service onto GoSmart's plans, the prices are identical.
Just remember, Airvoice isn't the
only GSM MVNO party in town... and there's very good things to say about Platinumtel's own Real PayGo rates in comparison to Airvoice's $10/month plan. You might lose 50 minutes of talk time for every $10 spent, but you gain ~70MB of available data if need be. ;)