Three new mobile phone plans that might just save you money.
What's going on. I'm Rich Demiro. This is Rich on Tech. There are lots of mobile phone plan options out there, but in reality, many people don't want to switch for a better deal because they're tied up in device payments or your phone is tied to a particular carrier. But there are some new and compelling options out there in the wireless world, and I'm going to go over three of them that I'm getting lots of questions about. Spectrum Mobile,
Metro by T Mobile, and Verizons Visible. All three services have compelling prices that could save you almost fifty percent on a typical unlimited plan and offer many of the same features and the network quality that you're used to. Let's start with spectrom Mobile, because this one is all over the airwaves. This is a pretty compelling new offering and wireless and if you're in a Spectrum area, you
see the commercials all day. They're advertising an unlimited plan for forty five dollars a month, or you can pay by the gigabyte at just fourteen dollars a month. Spectrum Mobile runs on a combination of the Verizon Now Work and Spectrum's Wi Fi hotspots. Basically, if they can route your call over their own Wi Fi hotspot, they will do this. Otherwise it just goes over the Verizon network and all of this is invisible to you, the end user. You just dial your numbers the way you always do. Also,
Spectrum doesn't say that their service runs on Verizon. They just say it's on America's largest LTE network, and the map is in Verizon's signature red.
So you get the idea.
Now, for the average user, the fine print on Spectrum mobile plans isn't actually that bad. You do have to pay taxes and fees on top of the forty five dollars plan price, and although the plan is unlimited, they
might slow you down after twenty gigabytes of use. In any given cycle, you even get to use your phone as a mobile hotspot, but after five gigabytes of hotspot data use, this feature is slowed down to a turtle speed of six hundred kilobytes per second, which is almost fast enough to check your email.
Also, video streams at.
DVD quality or four ADP not a deal breaker, as many of the other popular unlimited plans have similar limitations, but there are two main sticking points to know about. First, you must keep your Spectrum Home Internet to get the forty five dollars a month plan. Otherwise, if you cancel your home internet service, they will charge you an extra twenty dollars a month that instantly negates any savings that
you might realize on this plan. The other thing is that right now you must purchase your phone through Spectrum. This means you cannot bring your current device, which might be paid off from another carrier. Spectrum offers a selection of current devices, including the iPhone tens and Tens Max, as well as Samsung devices like the Note nine and
the S nine. They also give you twenty four hours to pay with no interest, as other cell phone carriers do, and the company says the ability to bring your own device is coming later this year. So is Spectrum Mobile a good deal right now only if you're in the market for a new phone and have no intention of
giving up your home internet service through the company. But if you plan to stick with Spectrum Home Internet for two years and you need a new phone that you would be buying from another mobile carrier over twenty four months, you could save some money.
My mind, imath On one Spectrum mobile line.
Versus a single Verizon line with similar features, You would save about thirty dollars a month or seven hundred and twenty dollars over two years. Otherwise, I would wait to see what the deal is with bringing your own existing device when they announce those details later this year.
One Spectrum allows this.
It could mean even greater savings if your phone is already paid off and it works on their network. Next up, Visible Visible is a secret phone service run by Verizon. For forty dollars a month, you get unlimited calls, text, and data. Kind of funny they call it Visible when really it's tough to find out about. The big question here is whether your existing cell phone works with the service.
Many iPhones will, but Visible does have a section on their website where you can pop in the unique identifying code from your cell phone called an Imei number to see if it's compatible. The main thing to know here is that your speeds are limited to five megabits per second.
This is definitely.
Fine for most video streaming emails, surfing the web, and posting to Instagram, but if you are a phone user and like to stream live from your phone or watch and post videos from your device all day long.
You might find the speed limitation.
Frustrating, especially since the Verizon network is really fast and it can handle speeds that are often ten times the five megabits they limit you to. Additionally, you have to be a DIY person. Visible requires you to sign up through their app, pop in a simcard that they send you, and pay your bill digitally with a card or payment service like PayPal. If you have an issue, you can't walk into a store. This service is primarily aimed at millennials.
In fact, at the start it was invite only, but overall, if you're the kind of person who likes to tag your own luggage at the airport, you self service check out at the grocery store, or you like online chat and email versus calling in a eight hundred number for help, you might be fine with Visible. Finally, Metro by t Mobile In case you haven't heard the news, Metro PCs is becoming Metro by t Mobile. The revamped brand has rolled out several new plans with compelling features, most notably
one with an Amazon on Prime membership built in. The big difference here is that Metro is a prepaid plan, so you pay for your service before you actually use it each month. Not a big deal since many wireless customers are already on auto pay anyway, so it's really not much different from what you're used to the other nice thing about Metro is that taxes and fees are included, so the price of the plan is the price that
you will actually pay every month. The thing to know about Metro is that you're getting the same T Mobile network. The big difference here is that postpaid T Mobile customers.
Get priority on the network.
So let's say you're at a baseball game where everyone is using their phone and all the T Mobile towers are overloaded. Theoretically, a regular T Mobile customer might see their Instagram picture post first because they're getting priority on the network they're the ones paying the premium. In reality, this should rarely be the case, but you do need to be aware of this distinction. The other difference between a Metro plan and a standard T Mobile plan is
when they start slowing down your data. With Metro, you might be slowed down after using thirty five gigabytes of data in a cycle, but with T Mobile that number is fifty gigabytes. With T Mobile, you also get free international roaming, so if you travel out of the country a lot and you want to use your phone, a standard T mobile plan might be a better bet. Video on both services is streamed at DVD quality now. The
big advantage to Metro is its variety of plans. You can get a plan as low as thirty dollars a month, but that includes just a teeny.
Tiny bit of data.
If you're looking at the high end, for fifty or sixty dollars a month, you can get many of the most popular wireless features, including mobile hotspot. The most interesting plan to me is the sixty dollars a month, which is their top plan. You get unlimited data, talk, and text, including a good amount of mobile hotspot use, and they even include one hundred gigabytes of Google backup storage space
and Amazon Prime. Those one hundred gigs on Google usually cost two dollars a month, and an Amazon Prime membership if you paid up monthly, would run you thirteen dollars a month, So you can subtract fifteen dollars a month from the top plan and you're effectively paying just forty five dollars a month for an unlimited plan. One thing to know Metro's new look, and new plans don't happen
until October. So the bottom line, Spectrum, Visible, and Metro are just three new options in a sea of wireless plans. And while many of you are probably gonna stick with your big old school plan from one of the main carriers like AT and T, T Mobile or Verizon, you really can save some money if you're not a power phone user. I pay about one hundred and eighty dollars a month for two unlimited lines, and I would love to pay less, but I don't like any restrictions on
my network speeds. Plus I like to pay a bit extra to have my video streamed at HD quality versus DVD quality. Plus I'm always live streaming something or uploading or downloading huge files and using my phone as a mobile hotspot. But again, I'm sort of the exception to the rule here. I'm not the typical mobile phone user. My job relies on all this social media and all of this streaming and all of this content creation, so
I have to pay a premium for that. If none of those things are important to you, or if only a few of them are important to you, you could save a lot of money by shopping around and going with a carrier, or a plan that isn't as we well known but backed by one of the big networks.
Thanks so much for listening.
If you want links to all the plans I talked about, you can go to my website it's Rich on tech dot tv, or check the show notes. And if you enjoy listening to this podcast, please share it with your friends. Take a screenshot of you listening on your phone and post it to social media, and be sure to tag me so I can share in the love and share your post.
I'm Rich Demiro. I'll talk to you real soon.