[Discuss] T-Mobile pre-paid plans

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Doug wrote:
> Our carrier is T-Mobile, using their pay-as-you-go, no data plan.
> ... In a year's time, we pay T-Mobile $400 for all our minutes
> (4x1000).

If you don't use many voice minutes you can actually get by for as
little as $100 per *year* per phone with T-Mobile. (That's the minimum
you pay to keep the account from expiring, and it gets you a "pile"
(considering voice minutes are in declining need) of minutes.)

The T-Mobile pay-per-minute plan has no data, but interestingly you can
switch to a pay-per-day plan at any time from the handset. On this plan
$2 will get you 24 hours of "unlimited" (some carrier definition of
unlimited that doesn't mean what normal people understand it to mean) 2G
and $3 buys you 3G for a day. The next day you can switch back. So you
can effectively get "on demand" cell data if you find yourself without
WiFi, and need cell data only occasionally.


> The only time I could imagine really needing data might be to do
> GPS-like stuff.  I bought Copilot that downloads the maps to the
> phone, so now that is a non-issue.

I found it interesting that a year ago virtually no one was offering
offline maps for their GPS apps. Copilot was among the few. Now there
are several, and just recently Google Maps introduced offline maps. (I
believe it is a tad more limited than the paid apps. You specify a
region (a state perhaps? Maybe a few states?) and it downloads maps for
that. The commercial apps will download all of the US or North America.)

Kind of perplexing, given how spotty data coverage can be, particularly
if you venture away from the city, that initially offline maps were a
rarity. I guess they were constrained by limited storage on the devices.

I see the same thing happening with podcast players in reverse. For
years I looked for a desktop podcast player that could stream, taking
advantage of my always on net connection. I eventually found one for
Windows, which the vendor later abandoned. Never found one for Linux.
Yet on Android, almost all of the podcast players will stream, which is
exactly the sort of device that has unreliable net connection and should
be using a download model. (Most will also optionally download.)

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/