Choosing the right cellular plan is incredibly hard.
Right now I’m paying $57.12 per month for my cellular service. I have been planning to buy a Blackberry 7290 from T-Mobile on their stand-alone plan for $30 per month, which would push me over $90 per month with taxes and “fees”. That’s too much.
So I started looking at my minute usage over the past six months. It’s all over the map: 399, 325, 101, 295, 180, 160. On average I am paying $0.23 per minute. Not good.
Then I started looking at pay-as-you-go plans. There’s Boost (Nextel), Virgin (Sprint), Verizon, Cingular, and T-Mobile. Most of them are incredibly bad deals with high per-minute rates or daily usage fees. T-Mobile To Go is the best deal at $0.10 per minute if you buy in $100 increments, which would cut my voice expenses by more than half.
But going back to the Blackberry… T-Mobile knocks off $10 when you bundle Blackberry service with any voice plan. For an extra $30 per month I could have more included minutes than I will ever use.
Based on the previous six months, T-Mobile To Go would cost me $24 per month. A $6 premium for carrying a single device should be a no-brainer, but my usage is trending down and I expect it to stay that way. So it’s more like a $12 premium. Plus taxes and extortion fees.
What to do, what to do…
