I’m well aware of the cut-rate carriers piggybacking the obsolete networks, that’s not what I’m asking. It seems in the UK, you can take an unlocked smartphone to pretty much any carrier and pay a rather modest monthly fee for unlimited data on a network that’s 3G, at minimum. Can I do anything close to that in the US? The answer appears to be “no.”
Twice as expensive as a comparable UK plan. We must have differing operating definitions for the word “modest.”
It’s just the only thing I’m aware of. I didn’t say it was a great deal. Although it is in comparison to most other shitty deals over here. Something similar on Vodafone in the UK would cost you somewhere north of $40, so it isn’t totally awful.
Giffgaff stands out in the UK as much cheaper than the big networks.
Living in the UK, I find what I’ve seen of the US system, such as it is, to be totally bizarre. I saw fees of $.03 per kilobyte of data on a US mobile phone website the other day. That’s $30 per megabyte - completely insane. One cat gif could cost $100. My carrier’s cheapest pay-as-you-go plan charges 20p for the first 20mb and 20p for each further mb each day and I find that to be very overpriced, since for 60 of those 20ps (£12) I can get unlimited data for 30 days, and a bunch of minutes and unlimited texts to boot.
Incidentally the unlimited data packages are quite new and somewhat controversial and there’s a lot of misleading marketing out there as to what exactly constitutes “unlimited”. The typically toothless regulators (the ASA, Ofcom and Oftel) have dithered about it but there’s no gold standard definition. Some include tethering, some don’t; some have restrictve “fair use policies” that essentially say “if you go over 30gb downloaded in one month, your connection will be slowed to a crawl” despite the service being marketed as “unlimited”. But the plans do exist, they are cheap, and it’s excellent.
Which isn’t to say that the phone companies don’t still skank you on contract deals, but it seems like we’re getting a much better deal than you even when we’re getting screwed!
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That’s not really true any more, though. They’ll try to scam you on the contract deals, sure, but prices for sim only plans are coming down. I saw a plan on 3 that was £12.90 for 200 mins, 5000 texts and unlimited data, with no minimum term. A bit more expensive than giffgaff but not by much. £5 more per month for tethering, as well, which giffgaff don’t offer.
It is bizarre. Those floating definitions for “unlimited” are very intentional, and have been controversial here, too. It’s taken several years since the introduction of caps for more than one carrier to offer no-caps, no-throttling data. Just in time for our effective-monopoly broadband carriers to throttle their services that we also pay waaaay too much for. USA! USA! USA…and I’m back to depressed.
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