Cell Phone Plans - Revisited

It was too good of a deal to last forever.  In our book Retired at 48, we described our cell phone usage pattern as data heavy-voice "lite".  We rarely use the phone to make or receive phone calls or texts, but we do use the email and internet features daily.  The pay-as-you-go plan with data add-on option from 7-Eleven SpeakOut Wireless was perfect for our needs.  After buying a $10 SIM card, you can add air time (spent at $0.25/minute talk and $0.10/text) to your unlocked cell phone in denominations of $25-$100 and the additional minutes last for 365 days as opposed to the standard 30-60 days.

But even better was the data add-on of $10 per month for unlimited usage.  This is the part that was too good to last forever, and it hasn't.  SpeakOut has changed its pay-as-you-go data add-on to $10 per month for 100MB with additional usage charged at $0.10/MB.  There is no option to buy a larger add-on for more data with the pay-as-you-go plan.

An alternative is to abandon the pay-as-you-go plan and buy a SpeakOut Value Plan instead.   The cheapest value plan costs $20 for 100 talk minutes per month (way more than we ever use) and allows you to choose data add-ons of 500MB for $15 or 1GB for $25.  So our monthly cell phone fees would go up from about $12 to around $35-45 depending on our data usage.

Our first instinct was to repeat the price comparison analysis which we described in the book, to determine if we should change providers.  For our new analysis, we used 10 minutes talk time, 500MB data and the voicemail feature as our monthly requirements.

What we quickly realized is that for our usage pattern, Speakout is still the most inexpensive option for us.  Most of the other providers forced you to buy a pricier plan in order to get 500MB of data.  Wind Mobile came close with its $30 plan that offers unlimited data.  But Wind charges $8/month for voicemail and is not an official Apple Supplier, which is no good for us since we own an iPhone.  We are also concerned about the breadth of Wind's coverage area.

Our 500MB data requirement was just an estimate.  We really don't know how much data we use monthly on our cell phone, because up to now, our data was unlimited so we didn't keep track.  Since we mainly use our phone to check emails, it is possible that our usage will fall within the 100-350MB limit.  If this is the case, then we could stay on the pay as you go plan with the $10/100MB add-on and pay the $0.10/MB for up to an extra 250MB before we reach the $35 cost of the value plan.  We will try this pay-as-you-go with 100MB data add-on option for a couple of months in order to gauge what our real usage is.  We can then decide whether or not to switch to a value plan.

One consideration that influenced our decision was our desire to upgrade our iPhone 3GS to a newer iPhone model. An unlocked iPhone 4S is selling for $450 at the Apple Store while the 5S is $719.  Our plan had been to buy the 4S and stay with the SpeakOut, but since we were reevaluating cell phone plans anyways, we considered selecting a locked in plan for 2 years in order to get a 5S for $229.  There was a Bell Lite plan at $55 month that provided 500MB of data and 1000 talk minutes.  The $20 difference in monthly cell phone fees for two years would be offset by the $490 discount on the newer phone.  But when we called to confirm, we found out that the discount was only for the Bell Plus plan which was $80/mth!  The discount on the 5S for the Bell Lite plan was a mere $50.  Who would willingly lock into a plan for 2 years to save $50?!?   Then we considered buying the 5S anyways while staying with SpeakOut.  This was also not possible because currently SpeakOut does not support the new nano SIM card that the 5S requires.

So finally our decision was made.  We would buy an unlocked iphone 4GS, stay with our current pay-as-you-go plan and add the $10 for 100MB feature.  After a few months, if we find we are regularly using more than 350MB per month, we will switch to the appropriate SpeakOut value plan.