The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: jimmygibbon on March 08, 2012, 05:00:45 PM
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Hello fellow Mustachians,
I need advice on reducing my internet expenses. I currently have:
Time Warner Roadrunner at 47.84 per month
Cricket Broadband at 35.00 per month
I have decided that one of them has to go, so I am entertaining the idea of dumping the Roadrunner because the Cricket is cheaper and is also portable.
The Roadrunner internet is the Standard offering at 10Mbps and I am not sure if there is a data limit.
The Cricket Broadband states that the data limit is 2.5gig.
I have not yet cancelled the Roadrunner as I have decided to run a 4 week experiment by using only the Cricket Broadband to see if it will be adequate.
Does anyone have any experience in using Cricket Broadband as their sole ISP?
I have also created a new Yahoo email as I will be losing the Roadrunner email which I have had for 15 years and I am transitioning all of my email to now go to Yahoo.
Any and all comment/suggestions/criticisms are very much appreciated.
Jimmy
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I have Time Warner Cable for Internet access, but signed up via Earthlink, so it's $39.95/mo. For the time being, you're right, they do not have a data limit.
The 2.5 gig data limit with Cricket seems low to me. Do you know what your current average/max usage is per month?
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I've got cable internet for 34.99 -- it's the lowest level of bandwidth offered (works fine and I stream video/surf internet constantly), such a low cost the cable company doesn't advertise it on their website. They only start advertising the $49.99 deal. Always pays to call and ask if they have something cheaper even if it's not advertised... plus I think I lucked out with an honest salesman :-)
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I want to echo the earthink option mentioned by Chris. I previously had TWC with a promo for about 34 or so per month. It only lasted a year and then jacked up to 52.+ What was I to do?...my apartment building is locked down on cable by TWC and I do not want to sign a contract for low rates on DSL service! I found out about Earthlink being a rebranded TWC service and they offered me a deal for 6 months of service at 29.95. After this time I should be able to get a promo offer from TWC. I would definitely check with them and even TWC for promotional offers. Also, tell them that it's becoming too expensive, the may actually lower the rate. Before I found out about earthlink I did that and they lowered to $41.+
Sometimes this all boils down to the building you live in or the coverage area you live in for wireless. I would possible switch to an LTE with clearwire but they, and many others, do not have LTE coverage here even though it is the 8th largest populated city in the US. Perhaps its the hilly terrain.
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You may be able to call Time Warner and see if they'll reduce your bill. Especially since you're such a long time customer, they would really be willing to.
Regarding Cricket: I used them as my sole provider for a while, due to heavy filtering at my university. When it was good, it was good. But when it got spotty, it completely bombed. There wasn't much of a middle ground. It's also dependent on the signal coverage in your area.
BTW, what cell phone do you use? If you have an Android smartphone, it's relatively simply to get it to tether to your computer for free (as in no extra charge on your service). If you did this, you could drop the Cricket modem.
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Hi Cosmie,
My cell phone is just a basic Cricket phone. I do however have a Blackberry as my work phone.
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Hi Chris,
I am not sure of the Cricket average monthly usage because I rarely used it (only sporadically when on the road, etc.). I have, however, started experimenting with using the Cricket as my sole internet on 3-3-12 and will continue to monitor the usage for the next 3 weeks. This is the usage data that I have thus far:
3/3/12 Duration: 5177 Bytes Rcvd: 11780739 Bytes Sent: 2088129 Total Bytes: 13868868
3/3/12 Duration: 42306 Bytes Rcvd: 109104513 Bytes Sent: 21367345 Total Bytes: 130471858
3/4/12 Duration: 43207 Bytes Rcvd: 230308845 Bytes Sent: 25421441 Total Bytes: 255730286
3/4/12 Duration: 38309 Bytes Rcvd: 72144775 Bytes Sent: 12373397 Total Bytes: 84518172
3/6/12 Duration: 43208 Bytes Rcvd: 114089666 Bytes Sent: 21141242 Total Bytes: 135230908
3/7/12 Duration: 5641 Bytes Rcvd: 24390837 Bytes Sent: 5163649 Total Bytes: 29554486
3/7/12 Duration: 43207 Bytes Rcvd: 131965932 Bytes Sent: 16215479 Total Bytes: 14818141
3/8/12 Duration: 43207 Bytes Rcvd: 107588883 Bytes Sent: 18148275 Total Bytes: 125737158
The above stats are the snapshot that I have of my usage since beginning my experiment and quite honestly I don't know if this is considered high usage or low usage. I also have a dumb question:
It looks as thought the Duration is measured in seconds. Should I be shutting down the computer when I am not using? Sorry for the stupid question, but I have been so accustomed to having the Roadrunner, which is always connected, and perhaps I should be disconnecting from the Cricket when I am sleeping, lol. I'm not sure if this makes a difference in the data used.
Thank you so much,
Jimmy
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Hi Chris,
I am not sure of the Cricket average monthly usage because I rarely used it (only sporadically when on the road, etc.). I have, however, started experimenting with using the Cricket as my sole internet on 3-3-12 and will continue to monitor the usage for the next 3 weeks. This is the usage data that I have thus far:
3/3/12 Duration: 5177 Bytes Rcvd: 11780739 Bytes Sent: 2088129 Total Bytes: 13868868
3/3/12 Duration: 42306 Bytes Rcvd: 109104513 Bytes Sent: 21367345 Total Bytes: 130471858
3/4/12 Duration: 43207 Bytes Rcvd: 230308845 Bytes Sent: 25421441 Total Bytes: 255730286
3/4/12 Duration: 38309 Bytes Rcvd: 72144775 Bytes Sent: 12373397 Total Bytes: 84518172
3/6/12 Duration: 43208 Bytes Rcvd: 114089666 Bytes Sent: 21141242 Total Bytes: 135230908
3/7/12 Duration: 5641 Bytes Rcvd: 24390837 Bytes Sent: 5163649 Total Bytes: 29554486
3/7/12 Duration: 43207 Bytes Rcvd: 131965932 Bytes Sent: 16215479 Total Bytes: 14818141
3/8/12 Duration: 43207 Bytes Rcvd: 107588883 Bytes Sent: 18148275 Total Bytes: 125737158
The above stats are the snapshot that I have of my usage since beginning my experiment and quite honestly I don't know if this is considered high usage or low usage. I also have a dumb question:
It looks as thought the Duration is measured in seconds. Should I be shutting down the computer when I am not using? Sorry for the stupid question, but I have been so accustomed to having the Roadrunner, which is always connected, and perhaps I should be disconnecting from the Cricket when I am sleeping, lol. I'm not sure if this makes a difference in the data used.
Thank you so much,
Jimmy
Jimmy, I just crunched those numbers, and it appears that you've already used about 10MB shy of 800MB (if the math is accurate - got 789,929,877 Bytes) in five days. You've nearly used a third of your bandwidth in a sixth of your billing cycle. Unplugging the modem during downtime would help with some of this extraneous usage, but it still underscores the fact that mobile broadband costs more than land line to run.
There's been some excellent suggestions in this thread already about lowering your Warner broadband costs either by using Earthlink or inquiring about the unadvertised lower bandwidth packages from them directly, and I think you'll be far more pleased with those results than jumping to Cricket. I've also got a relatively decent primer (https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/share-your-badassity/communications-tech-isps-voip-cell/) going on communications tech over in the Share Your Badassity category that you might want to give a read on as it gives a lot of good general advice on cutting telecommunications costs.
Best of luck, and hope I've helped.
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Hi I.P. Daley,
Thank you so very much for your post. I will definitely unplug the Cricket modem when not in use and I think that should help. I will also check into Earthlink and make a call to Time Warner to see if cheaper options are available. Thanks very much.
Jimmy
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Just wanted to update my internet scenario for those interested. I ran an experiment for 60 days before pulling the proverbial plug on the Roadrunner internet by solely using my Cricket broadband to make certain that it would meet my needs before cancelling the Roadrunner. I am pleased to report that the Cricket broadband has worked just fine and that I cancelled the 47.99 Roadrunner last week. When I called Time Warner to cancel the Roadrunner, the customer service person commented that I was such a long time customer (15 years) and that they were certainly sorry to lose me and offered to lower my Roadrunner bill by 2.00 per month if I would stay. I politely declined their ever so generous discount to stay (now where is that sarcasm emoticon). So, in summary, I was able to save 47.99 per month.
Jimmy
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offered to lower my Roadrunner bill by 2.00 per month if I would stay
Hilarious!
Good work, way to try out something new and save money. Thanks for the follow up.