I saw the thread about cell phone plans. But I have a particular question. I know pagepluscellular is probably the cheapest, if you never really use a cellphone but just want to have a cellphone with you, pageplus cellular will cost you ONL $2.50 per month.
Technically from a pure cost perspective, Truphone is actually the cheapest MVNO available from a minimal monthly usage standpoint as there's no airtime expiration or service fees so long as the account doesn't go idle for longer than 30 or 45 days, IIRC. It's the only MVNO I know of where you can basically make a $10 credit last forever and keep the phone number so long as you received an SMS once a month and don't use it for anything else.
The ONLY PROBLEM I have with truphone is the data is extremely expensive at $0.09 per megabyte (9 cents a megabyte). This is way too expensive and sometimes my phone accidentally uses data somehow and all of a sudden within 30 seconds I lose $5 of my balance.
Are there any other phones with a fair and decent price with data?
Actually, from a PAYGO standpoint, 9¢/MB isn't a
bad rate. P'tel is 10¢/MB with a minimum monthly cost of $5, Airvoice is 6.6¢/MB with a minimum monthly cost of $3.33 minus $1/month service fee, H2O Wireless is 10¢/MB at $3.33/month with their EasyGo sub-brand running 5¢/MB at a minimum of $5/month, and even Page Plus is 10¢/MB at that $2.50/month. For PAYGO data on a low usage plan, it's not a terrible rate.
Also, the math here isn't exactly tallying. $5 in mobile data at 9¢/MB is ~55.56MB at a rate of around 15Mbps. Though T-Mobile's network can do this and better under certain conditions, and I don't know how much throttling happens for Truphone... it's not technically outside the realm, but it's also an insane amount of data for even a smartphone to randomly gobble up in the background the instant it gets internet access. This leads me to wonder one of two things, either you missed a
major setting regarding OTA software updates and data backups to be restricted to WiFi only somewhere, or there may be something on your phone doing something that it really shouldn't be. There should be logs indicating how much data the phone has used and what specifically used the data to help button it down.
Excuse the tip#5 bit at the bottom given it's sales copy for Truphone's competitor Knowroaming, but
the first four points here are pretty simple and easy to follow for data restriction on both Android and iOS, it's one of the better general data restriction guides I've found.
All that said, if your usage is light enough to justify PAYGO in general (excuse the non-deliberate bursts of data usage), then there's really not going to be a satisfactory solution that's not going to cost you at least $25-30+/month, and large gobs of data usually run about $10/GB with the commitment to pay for "unlimited" talk and text at around $20 a month in order to get that pricing.
Your best and cheapest solution isn't to try and find cheaper data with another carrier, it's to either turn off and
never use mobile data at all, or figure out where the leak is coming from and fix it. Spending more money just to accommodate abnormal behavior from your phone is letting your device dictate your spending and usage habits. When that happens, it ceases to be a tool you control and instead becomes a liability that controls you.
