latimes.com — Most telecom customers are buying more product than they use, and that's pure gravy for service providers. "It's hard for customers to gauge how much of this product they're going to use. The phone companies basically force you to calculate in advance something that's very difficult to calculate."
Mar 7, 2009 View in Crawl 4
cannedcornMar 9, 2009
I'd like to have a freaking data only plan, why is it only blackberry users that can have this convenience.
stevemaxMar 9, 2009
Use the money you saved to get a real unlocked phone. You should be able to get an Eseries/Nseries, or a high-end SE phone, for less money than what you've paid over these three years.
slantedMar 9, 2009
I wonder that, too... Sure we can calculate out the cost per minute used, but how do you factor in the unlimited text message plan vs. the thousands of messages I send/recieve a month, and my unrelentless use of the unlimited data?
jturboMar 9, 2009
The iPhone is wifi enabled... Unless accessing digg on the bus is worth $30 a month?
jturboMar 9, 2009
That post may have just set a record for diggs on a "first ever" post. Congrats!
jturboMar 9, 2009
You are the exact customer that these plans make sense for. But many people do not use their phones very often, so the P.A.Y GO route is the most cost effective.
sfongMar 18, 2009
I completely agree!!! I'm on a regular family plan (no FAVES) with T-mobile. We don't use very many of our anytime minutes, usually not even 50% so it seems like we would be one of those $3 figures. With T-mobile (and I'm assuming other carriers) you can look online and see how many minutes you use during the night, weekend, etc.. I just looked for this last months worth of service and did the math adding in all the free minutes. It came out to 8 cents a minute. I would think people with FAVES or who use more of their anytime minutes would come out even better. I think the reporter simply looked at the anytime minutes. Even than, I have a hard time believing those figures. Not counting in all our free minutes and just looking at regular minutes, we still come out to around 25 cents a minute. People have to be paying $100 a month for service and using a total of about 33 minutes to be paying $3 a minute. That seems highly improbable to me. Just because someone writes down facts and figures doesn't mean they're accurate.