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Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

For tablets, at least with T-Mobile, for $25 you get unlimited data. You only get a limited amount of tethering data.

True, but don't you have to treat the device as a separate line? If the laptop had cellular I'd have another bill to pay.

To be completely honest, I would be fine not having cellular data on my iPad and don’t think I would use more than 40GB of tethering ever if I took advantage if using WiFi every opportunity I could instead of not worrying about it.

It’s just one of those things that it’s convenient not having to worry about WiFi when we travel and hotel WiFi depending on how busy they are is often pretty bad.

But especially with a laptop, as often as we travel, I don’t think I’ve ever needed to tether to my Mac accept for brief periods of times when our condos shared WiFi went out (I work remotely).

I wouldn’t pay for a separate line for a computer. I am sure others would.

On another note, I did give my mom my previous iPad and kept the data plan so she doesn’t have to worry about WiFi when they take road trips.

T-mobile is so scammy, though. Have you been keeping up with all the lawsuits against them in the US?

All carriers are scammy in their own way

So, maybe don't do business with the worst of them? Of the big 3 in the US, T-Mobile is the one I'd avoid right now.

Verizon is overpriced and is the Comcast equivalent of cellular carriers. AT&T is about as bad

Verizon owns most of the value brands in the US and you made no connection between them and Comcast beyond mentioning them in the same sentence.

AT&T is "about as bad" as what? You gave no information.

Price, customer service

Based on the type of responses you are giving, I actually do believe you probably call your phone company's customer service regularly. So perhaps your criteria might be different. Have you heard of Consumer Cellular?

Consumer cellular rate plans are the same price as T-Mobile and they don’t have international roaming included.

That joke jitterbugged right past you.

You would be surprised how many people on HN will defend crappy products and servjce because of ideals - see Framework laptops, PinePhones etc.

Yeah, those products people are passionate about and really like are total junk. We should mock them while not explaining any of our reasoning, thank you for showing the way.

MVNOs FTW. They know they're competing for price-conscious consumers so have to offer more value. The big 3 know most of their customers are going to go with one of the big boys, all of whom are expensive and not great.

MVNOs have slower data rates since they buy deprioritized traffic in bulk, don’t have the roaming agreements domestically and especially not internationally, and don’t offer unlimited high speed data.

Hm, not my experience. When traveling internationally there was an option I could have used, but I chose to use a local SIM card instead. The data speeds are just fine for me, and I haven't experienced any issues with roaming domestically.

But then I don't even care about 5g versus 4g/LTE for the most part, so perhaps I'm just not noticing limits that affect others.

That’s how MVNOs work, they buy data in bulk at wholesale prices. But they pay for lower QoS. There isn’t anything wrong with that. But they are getting jankier bandwidth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QoS_Class_Identifier

T-Mobile comes with 5GB of high speed data per month to use for roaming in Canada and Mexico and lower speed data roaming almost anywhere else in the world.

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