[alexharrisnyc]

You only play for what you use. This rewards anyone who mainly stays on wifi. My bill is roughly ~$35 a month with them while everyone I know has bills of 70-120. If you sign up for 2GB but use 1.1GB you only pay $11.

[jogjayr]

A T-mobile family plan with unlimited data (throttled after 2GB) comes out to ~$25/month. If that didn't exist, I'd look into Google Fi.

[beckler]

Sounds like you got a rare deal, everything I'm seeing online says it's $70-$40 per line depending on how many lines you have.

[sharno]

I guess it depends on how many people you add to your family plan. The more people you add the cheaper it gets

[beckler]

Yeah, it's cheaper per person, but the total cost still rises no matter how many people you add.

[jogjayr]

That may be. But there's still the T-Mobile Essentials plan that's $30/line for 4 lines - and might be lower for more lines.

[dragonwriter]

> A T-mobile family plan with unlimited data (throttled after 2GB) comes out to ~$25/month.

This may be a legacy plan; the only thing they seem to currently offer is $40/line/month for 4 lines ($70/month for one), but throttled at 50GB/month (not clear if this is by line or account), not 2GB/month.

It's a little cheaper than Fi list price at the level Bill Protection (essentially, unlimited with 15GB/line throttling threshold) kicks in ($160/4 lines with TMo vs $205 for Fi). But Fi does refund if you use less than 14 GB total, which may reduce the effective price depending on usage pattern.

[driverdan]

That one month that you use over 2GB is hell. That alone keeps me away from throttled plans.

[pjc50]

How on earth do people have mobile bills of $120 a month?

[dawnerd]

A good chunk of that is phone payments, not the actual service cost.

[skh]

I own my phone and from the big carriers two phones or more generally costs $80+ a month.

[wil421]

I think those are family plan prices. I pay about $140 unlimited cell data, 15Gigs for tethering, an Apple Watch, and 2 lines of unlimited talk/text.

[iwiririwo]

How would the carrier know if you use your cellphone for tethering, and separately bill that traffic?

[wil421]

User Agent sniffing, traffic analysis, port sniffing and new phones might even tell them. The carriers are already doing a lot of load balancing among all the devices attached to their network. It wouldn’t be too hard to detect.

Years ago AT&T sent me text right when I connected to my hotspot. I can’t see the tethering data use on AT&Ts dashboard but I can see usage per line.

[poink]

$70+/mo major provider "unlimited" plan + $50+/mo flagship phone

[ggggtez]

Monopolies mostly. The US is big enough that there are really only 2, maybe 3 providers. Everyone else is a reseller.

[desireco42]

I can second this. Our family plan is 60-75 and we are really not trying to save.