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Comment by alexharrisnyc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

> 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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