Review of T-Mobile Pre-Paid 4G Monthly Service
When I was 16 or 17 years old I walked into a mall, marched into a Sprint store and signed myself up for a cell phone contract. At the time I was more concerned with being cool than I was worried about the financial commitment that I just made. I didn’t really think about the fact that I needed a “deposit” and was locked into a contract for the next two years at $30 a month (that’s right it was a 300 min plan). I didn’t really care I worked a lot of hours when I was in high school and always seemed to have far too much cash for a high schooler. On that day, I began my very long over 10 year saga with Sprint. Through the years I joined accounts and split my account off from my parents several times. The issue with that is it never actually kept a record of how long I had been a customer, not that it ever made a single difference.
After my 2nd Nexus S 4G started to fall apart and behave in odd ways, I started poking around for a new phone. Originally I planned to wait till the summer of 2013, when there might be a release of the newest Google phone made by Motorola. Just a few weeks ago, my phone really started going on the fritz, and I was pretty sure it just wasn’t going to make it any longer. I think most of the issues were really related to the small amount of internal memory on the Nexus S 4G and despite my efforts to minimize it, I just couldn’t get it down with it. Since the faithful day during high school I had done a complete 180 degree spin on position with contracts. I’ve fought to be out of contract since I was probably 20. I think I’ve only managed to be in a contract once since I was 23. The rest of the time I kept buying used phones off e-bay, so I could jump ship any time I wanted. Talk about commitment issues. :-P
Not that long ago I read about T-Mobile’s pre-paid monthly 4G plans. They’re actually really an amazing plan for $30 a month you can get 100 Minutes and upto 5 GB of 4G speeds. In actuality T-Mobile doesn’t actually have a big 4G coverage throughout the country. PC Magazine has a post on the fastest astest mobile networks per region. T-Mobile didn’t place as #1 on any single region, it has very consistent results at #2. Verizon placed #1 in all regions but comes with a total ownership cost that far exceeds T-Mobile’s ownership cost.
Overall I’m very happy with service that I’ve received with my new mobile network. I’ve been on the network for about a month and I’ve only found a basement bar that has poor service. The speed has been great for me. I’ve seen very little lag in downloads and uploads and generally it’s been far more usable than it was with Sprint. I do spend most of my time on WiFi though. Between being at work and home I’m rarely without WiFi. The biggest challenge can be the number of minutes. I’m only allowed 100 minutes before I have to start paying for $.10/ minute. With that being said before the switch I found that I tend to only talk on the phone at work or at home so it’s relatively easy to use Vonage or GrooveIP to get around the cellular network based calls and use a data network call. It’s been fairly reliable so far, but there’s been a few drops here and there. I might change the plan in the future but only time will tell…and I can do that with out signing a new contract.