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Comment by jwoah12 | Hacker News Reader

I just ordered one, but I'm currently on Verizon. What does everyone think is the best way to go in terms of non-contract carriers for the N5? Heard some good things about Straight Talk, but also read that their customer service is horrible.

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T-Mobile has non-contract plans.

http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans

Scroll alllll the way down to the bottom, look for the $30/month plans. They include 5 GB of data per month at 4G speeds, after that you're throttled. I've never come anywhere near to hitting that limit, so I don't know what the throttle is.

You can order a SIM card online, or pick one up in a store.

http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/phone-sim-card

Once the SIM is in your hand, then you can go into one of their stores or online to get one of the $30/month options.

What size sim does the Nexus 5 take?

By the way T-Mobile sims are temporarily free instead of $10 http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-phone/T-Mobile-Na... http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-phone/T-Mobile-Mi...

Do you know if T-Mobile has improved in the Phoenix area? The website shows 'excellent' coverage around here, but all I read online is horror stories of not having any signal in buildings etc. Apparently they wanted to work on that in the last 6-10 months, but I haven't heard anything about it since.

T-Mobile is great in the east valley for me - the only place I can't get a signal is in my home office in my house, but that seems to be some kind of odd wireless signal black hole in general. Most of the time I have a 4G signal with quite decent speeds.

I travel all around the valley, and rarely ever have any signal issues with T-Mobile, in the places I do have issues Verizon phones are the only ones with signals.

Where I live(Sun Dance) Verizon phones have little to no signal while I have 3-4 bars.

"This plan is only available for devices purchased from Wal-Mart or devices activated on T-Mobile.com"

What is a device activated on t-mobile.com? And how do you select it?

Buy a sim card from their website and activate at home. Only way to not get that deal is to go to a T-Mobile store.

Order a sim card from T-Mobile, put in the phone, and follow the online activation steps. Make sure you get the right size sim card (regular vs. mini). I originally got the wrong one for my nexus 4.

I am currently on this plan (on a Nexus 4), and it works quite well for me. There's also a 100 minutes talk time limit on the plan, with 10C per minute for extra talk time.

Hmm looking at my recent statements, I'm always between like 150 and 375 minutes, so even with the 10c per minute extra, I'd never be looking at more than $60/month at worst. I'm assuming nights and weekends still don't count as minutes on this plan?

There are no free nights and weekends with this plan.

Everything counts, but you can be strategic about usage - dialing via Google Voice from a laptop keeps me well under 100.

Never assume. Always read the contract language carefully.

Sorry, I used confusing language there. It was meant as a question for people who have the plan. There are scant details about the plan on the website.

I checked out the page, but it looks to me that the $30/month plans are just data. Am I looking at it wrong, or does that include voice and text as well?

They have one that's $30/month for 100 minutes talk + unlimited text and web (first 5GB at 4G speeds) which I think is what he was talking about. It's just below the "pay by the day" section.

I'm on Straight Talk and love it. But I've never had to deal with support. It's really easy to set up, the price is awesome (less than $50 for pseudo-unlimited everything including taxes), and it just works. And that's on the auto-renew plan. I'm not sure if I'll ever need support (can't see why at this point), but I do know that Tracphone has in the past provided poor customer service (when I used to use a cheap pre-paid phone through them). I do believe they put more into providing better customer service to their Straight Talk customers though. Anyway, I definitely recommend it. Far cheaper than AT&T and Verizon pre-paid/non-contract options and, for my usage patterns, every bit as good.

Keep in mind that my data usage is predominantly for Google Maps about town (in the Greater San Diego area), internet browsing, and occasionally streaming Pandora. I can't speak to how it would work to do much streaming video over Straight Talk. But for my needs, I'm very happy. I get what I want at a price (finally!) that I'm willing to pay. Versus how we used to pay AT&T something like $140/month (for two phones) for very few minutes (the smallest anytime minutes plan we could get), unlimited texting, and a couple hundred megabytes of data (as I recall).

T-mobile has a $30 prepaid plan that looks pretty good (100 minutes talk, unlimited text and "unlimited" [throttled after 5gb] data).

http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans, click "Which plan is right for you?"

100 minutes of talk is pretty meagre I would rather opt for MetroPCS starting from $40 a month with unlimited talk, data and text.

http://www.metropcs.com/metro/detail/MetroPCS_SIM_Card/61021...

The "unlimited" data on that plan is only 500MB of HSPA speeds. The 30-dollar T-mobile plan only starts throttling after 5 GB of data.

Once you go over 100 minutes, it simply starts charging from whatever balance you have on your account. You'll get a recorded message warning you, then I think it's $0.10/minute thereafter.

I usually stay under 100 minutes or go just up to the edge. If I'm at home and expect to be on hold or talk for a long time, I'll just use Google Voice from my computer, which is better than holding a phone anyway.

I look at it this way:

Plan #1: $30 for 100 minutes, with $0.10 a minute afterwards.

Plan #2: $40 for unlimited minutes with MetroPCS.

So, if I manage to talk less than 100min + ($50 - $40)/$0.10 = 200 minutes per month, then I end up spending less than I would on the MetroPCS plan.

I talk well over 300 minutes a month but I get your point

I ordered mine today as well (also a current verizon customer). No T-Mobile coverage here, but AT&T has some reasonably new Go Phone plans. I'm doing the $60/m unlimited talk/text w/2gigs 3g/4g data and options to buy more (you won't get mysteriously throttled). You'll also get access to ATT support rather than deal with something like Straight Talk. I would love to use Straight Talk but I can't risk my phone/sim being messed up for any long periods dealing with poor support. Even with the AT&T plan I'll save about $15/m (compared to Verizon) which will nearly cover my phone purchase over 2 years.

I've had Straight Talk for a year. I setup auto-pay, got my SIM cards, and have never needed support. My data usage is always under 2GB and I'm aware of using WiFi where possible. It's been a dream.

I've also never had a good customer experience with AT&T, Verizon, etc.

I've been on Straight Talk since I got a Galaxy Nexus over a year ago. Their customer service isn't great, but I never really have to deal with them. Just drop in the SIM, set up auto-pay, and blacklist their spammy reminder texts, and it's fine.

I think their data cap is around 2GB, but I've never come near that. What are you guys who are breaking 5GB caps doing with your phones anyways? The plan is unlimited voice, which is nice, since TMobile's 100min voice can be a little limiting sometimes.

I'm on Straight Talk and got flagged by their system.

Went 1 day without data access, a few days with limited connection (very slow) and a few weeks later they disabled my hotspotting ability.

I was using my phone as a wifi hotspot since I don't have internet at home.

That would be what their flagging is set up to catch...

Yep. They're very explicit in their literature about not using your device running on Straight Talk as a hotspot (tethering). It's clear enough that you don't even have to read the fine print to know it is the case. I think they print it in large letters somewhere but I can't remember.

I had straight talk for a bit. If I used more than 2GB of data in a month they would threaten to cancel my service. I'm not sure how much you use but that's something to be wary of. Otherwise, my service was fine. They didn't do LTE at the time so I was stuck with 3G.

There is widespread LTE on Straight Talk on both T-Mobile and AT&T in my area (Austin).

Did they threaten you about not using online media streaming?

They just said that I shouldn't do it much. They were fairly polite about it. I seem to recall there being a line in their user agreement that mentions prohibition of audio and video streaming, though I suppose it's not really enforced unless you exceed the limit consistently.

I'm in a major city (so coverage is good on most networks), but T-Mobile has a $30/mo, pay-as-you-go plan for unlimited text/data and 100 minutes of talk (which isn't a problem if you use something like Google Voice).

I'm on this plan and the biggest issue I've run into is that while the data is "unlimited", after 5GB it's throttled to frustratingly slow 2G speeds.

I was under the impression it was 5GB 4G then 3G from there, but it is not so.

That's right. "High speed" is 3G and "4g"

Google Voice by itself uses minutes. It's not a real VOIP app[1], but more like a hack that uses google as a phone proxy.

[1] Like https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.snrblabs.g... or https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moplus.gvp...

Google Hangouts on iPhone is voip, and there are plenty of other voip apps you could use instead so you don't have to use the cellular minutes.

Whats the preferred way to get google voice working on android ?

I am regretting the GV port I did when I moved to the Nexus line. All my friends like to MMS/ group text and I've had to revert to the base number of my sim card to communicate with my close friends.

With regards to one of the up the stream comments, I love the T-Mobile $30/mo 100min, unlimited text, 5gb 4g plan on my Nexus 4.

The GrooveIP app allows VoIP calling through Google Voice on Android.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gvoip&hl=e...

You can install it from Play. It's straightforward.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

It's not so straightforward if Google thinks you are not in the US.

Right, if Google doesn't think you are in the US, you won't be able to download Voice from Play. Which is really annoying if you actually are in the US...

I had to deal with this problem earlier this month, and the answer here fixed the issue for me: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/44677/how-to-chan...

That has always been the case, but is not so today. Google Play knows where I am as it offered the Nexus5 in Japanese Yen. Nevertheless I successsfully installed Google Voice just now.

Can you set it up? I've always been able to install the APK, but if you don't already have a GV number, it wants to send an SMS to a real phone number as part of the setup, and that number needed to be American.

As you say, cannot set it up. I guess nothing has changed.

Straight Talk is the way I would go. They have Unlimited Data, Text, and Voice all for 45 bucks.. If my wife didn't upgrade her iPhone a couple of months ago, we'd be switching to that. Save us a ton of money a month.

I'd do GoPhone if you need more coverage than T-Mobile will give you. $60 for 2 gigs isn't bad. And you're on the same APN as post-paid AT&T, so you get full access to LTE, etc.

Aio looks pretty good. I'm not sure how long they'll last, given that ATT is trying to merge them with Cricket, if their buyout goes through.

Aio Wireless is owned by AT&T

that's what he said...

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