Which Phone Plan Is The Cheapest - We independently evaluate everything we recommend. We may earn a commission when you make a purchase through our links. Learn more >
Our picks haven't changed, but we've updated this guide with information about Verizon's new unlimited data plans, the arrival of C-band 5G at AT&T and Verizon, and 3G shutdown plans for all major carriers.
Which Phone Plan Is The Cheapest
If you haven't seen how your current bill compares to what it might be under a new plan or on a new service, you should check now. Despite the recent shift from four national carriers to three, and the transition from 3G networks to 4G and now 5G, prices have fallen, while data allocations have increased, especially from the big three that resell services to dozens of smaller carriers. But as always, most deals come with a catch.
T Mobile Quietly Offers Cheaper No Voice Cellular Plan
There may not be one carrier or design that we can recommend for everyone, but we have recommendations for some common needs and advice for anyone with more unusual needs.
I've covered the wireless industry since the late 1990s—my first guide to cell phone service, written in 1998, devoted a lot of ink to comparing analog and digital cellular. I've tested smartphone and cell phone plans from all the major carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon, as well as Nextel, for the Washington Post, CNN Money, Discovery News, PCMag, VentureBeat, and others, and I now Cover technology and telecommunications issues for other sites including Fast Company, USA Today and trade publications such as Light Reading and FierceTelecom. And in July 2021, I test drove more than a thousand miles from Baltimore to Atlanta for PCMag's Fastest Mobile Network project.
We've narrowed this guide down to the most widely used national options—starting with the three largest nationwide carriers and their prepaid services and subsidiaries, then adding services that rank high in surveys from sites like PCMag, the American Customer Satisfaction Index, and J .D. Strength
We also chose to exclude competitors only available in certain parts of the US. This means the regional carrier US. Refuse the resale services of cellular and cable companies such as Comcast and Spectrum, which require a subscription to receive the advertised price of their residential broadband or to sign up. Finally, we reduced prepaid services that required separate purchases of data, text or voice minutes to meet any of our monthly usage quotas.
How To Get A Free Cell Phone 2023
For each, we calculated the price of three specific bundles of smartphone service: moderate use of 3 GB of data; For most people who need unlimited phone data but don't have more than 3GB of mobile hotspot usage; and heavy-use cases with unlimited data on phone plus 10GB of mobile hotspot usage. The total is higher than in previous editions of the guide because general data usage has increased significantly: In March 2022, NPD Group analyst Brad Akuez told us that the company's research impacted US it. Median smartphone cellular data usage in the fourth quarter of 2021. 12 GB per month, with average usage (skewed by extreme cases) at 17.2 GB.
We no longer factor in included messaging or voice minutes, as all services eligible for inclusion now offer unmetered messaging and calling.
You can't assess the quality of a wireless network in a single-letter category: coverage and performance often vary greatly by location. They also change over time – as anyone who used T-Mobile in 2011 and is on the carrier today can attest. To try to get the most balanced picture of the three major carriers (and the services that resell their networks), we consulted wireless network coverage and independent surveys from Opensignal, PCMag, and RootMetrics. We're less interested in exceptionally fast download speeds if the coverage is spotty to access those speeds; Consistently good performance in places where most people live, work and visit is a high priority.
Our cost estimates assume that those who want to use their phone's mobile-hotspot feature to share their LTE or 5G bandwidth for any length of time want to do so at full speed, without throttling down to 2G-esque speeds, some like "Unlimited." "Plans are basic. We also assume that most people will not use more than 3 GB of data a month with this feature, as it can really drain the phone's battery, but we have an intensive scenario that assumes up to 10 GB per month Smartphone usage.
Find The Best Sim Card Options In Germany
We also crunched the same numbers for shared-use plans for two and four lines, because many of you said you wanted to compare your options for family pricing.
If a plan offers a lower rate to enable auto-pay or pay a year in advance, or includes loyalty discounts that lower your bill over time (a new feature for Verizon Prepaid starting in summer 2020), we'll consider those options. However, we did not count deals that require trading in phones or porting to numbers.
Because almost all US it. Market phones will work on any of the big three carriers, we didn't look at the phones that each carrier or service sells on its own site and in its own store. We also didn't consider the advertising that wireless service throws up for every new iPhone.
It also doesn't include the value of media-bundled deals like T-Mobile adding a free Netflix subscription with two or more lines on the account, AT&T adding $15 HBO Max service to its $85 unlimited Elite plan, and Verizon. On some of its unlimited plans, bundles with Apple Music or Disney +, Hulu and ESPN +.
Xiaomi Redmi Note 10
Finally, we didn't consider taxes and regulatory fees because they vary by jurisdiction (in my case, with a legacy T-Mobile plan, for example, the fees added up to 7.4% of my October 2021 bill). But regardless of where you live, all your options should be affected by taxes and fees the same — except for T-Mobile's Magenta plan and offers from Boost and Visible, which all include taxes in their advertised prices.
If more data is more important to you than coverage in non-metropolitan areas, the Magenta plan offers good value for unlimited data on a strong network. Also, T-Mobile has the best 5G services and international plans.
If data is your priority—in the sense of having a fast network connection and being able to use it to download and upload in volume—you should consider the T-Mobile Magenta plan. T-Mobile's basic unlimited data offer is more generous than its two rivals, and the rollout of 5G has greatly improved its already good network in an ever-expanding part of the country.
The price alone should grab your attention: Magenta costs $70 per month for unlimited phone data, with 100GB priority. (T-Mobile may then slow down your connection to make room for connections from other customers, but whether you experience this depends on external factors such as how many customers are in an area and how busy the network is.) This is twice the allocation. At AT&T and Verizon. Comparable plans cost between $5 and $10 more before taxes and fees. T-Mobile folds the fees into the advertised rate. (Two lines of Magenta cost $60 each, and four runs $35 each.) You don't get that much data to use for mobile hotspot sharing, but the 5 GB included here is still plenty. Above that cap, T-Mobile advertises "3G speed," a seemingly generous fallback option that we appreciated — but the broadband disclosure page shows you're only getting 600 kbps, which is functionally no better than 2G-level speeds. AT&T and Verizon allow higher their own hotspot caps.
These Cheap Phones Are Worth Getting On A Telstra Plan
All the data allotment in the world isn't helpful if the connection is too slow to use, but T-Mobile's network is ahead thanks to its 5G frequencies. The mid-band spectrum acquired by T-Mobile after its acquisition of Sprint allows it to effectively deploy faster 5G with better coverage than AT&T and Verizon's and even C's faster but weaker millimeter-wave 5G. -band 5G that the two rivals currently offer. And the mid-band 5G, which T-Mobile markets as Ultra Capacity 5G, also offers faster service than the low-band 5G that fills its network, making it the most widely available form of 5G.
The difference is even more pronounced in third-party tests and in our own evaluations of Wi-Fi hotspots from the three major carriers.
Opensignal's crowdsourced test results for T-Mobile, released in January 2022, give the provider a commanding lead over the Big Three for both download and upload speeds. And OpenSignal's 5G-specific tests, also released in January, show an even bigger advantage for T-Mobile: average 5G download speeds of 150 Mbps, well above the 56.2 Mbps and 49.1 Mbps download averages on Verizon and AT&T. And you have a better chance of enjoying those speeds, with 5G available on T-Mobile at 35.4% - more than double the second-best figure of 16.5%.
Which phone service is the cheapest, which cell phone service is the cheapest, which phone carrier is the cheapest, which is the cheapest cell phone company, which is the cheapest cell phone plan, which is the cheapest phone company, which is the cheapest cell phone carrier, which mobile phone company is the cheapest, which is the cheapest samsung phone, which is the cheapest prepaid cell phone plan, which is the cheapest phone, which is the cheapest 5g phone
