I’ve been an iPhone user since day one, yep I paid the full price. Along with my shiny new perfect 2007 iPhone I got an unlimited data plan. This was back before there were fun apps, faster data speeds or really any way to really consume a ton of data. As the years went by and the iPhone got fancier with more capabilities AT&T decided to make a change. In June of 2010 just before the release of the iPhone 4 AT&T announced that the unlimited data plan was going bye bye. Bad news for people that were about to purchase their first iPhone, but not the end of the world for us previous owners as we were grandfathered in. AT&T dangled a carrot though, they were going to allow us to tether! Unfortunately to tether you had to have the $25 Data Pro account with a 2GB cap, and give up your beloved unlimited plan. Oh and the real kick in the shins was you had to pay $20 on top of the $25 for just the privilege to tether. Well this rubbed me, and many others the wrong way. So I dug my heals in and kept my unlimited plan, smugly thinking that I would show them.
It’s nearly a year later and things have changed. AT&T now has the Hot Spot feature and you can supply WiFi to multiple devices from your iPhone. They also were kind enough to kick in another 2GBs of data with the tethering plan to give you 4GBs total. After testing out the Hot Spot with my husband’s iPhone it worked well enough that with both of us connected I was able to VPN into a client’s network and remotely control and fix their Mac via ARD. That was all I needed to see, I was sold. This also changed my iPad 2 order. I no longer felt like it was necessary to get the 3G model, saving me $130 there as well.
It was time to cancel the Verizon MiFi which was flakey at best (we went through 3 exchanges and it occasionally would just be deactivated leaving us stranded). Even if the MiFi would have been perfect, you still had to remember to have it on you. Since it was shared between two of us in our house chances were it wasn’t there when you needed it. Oh, and before someone chimes in with you should just jailbreak and use the My-Wi app which would give me a hotspot and uses my unlimited data plan, I’m fully aware of this option. I didn’t jailbreak to get things I don’t pay for. Not to mention that AT&T is on to it and going to be charging people.
So what’s the savings of changing my plan? Nothing actually, I break even. I was at $30 for unlimited and $15 for the low end iPad 3G plan. I’m now $25 for Data Pro and $20 for tethering option. So why do it? My $45 a month will now be much more functional. I always have my iPhone on me, always. So now I can have WiFi anywhere for not only my iPad 2 but my MacBook Pro as well. For someone who does Help Desk type support for hundreds of clients this is a handy feature to help them remotely faster. I also just made my tween extremely happy on car trips as he can have WiFi anywhere as well. So for the same $45 a month I turned useless unlimited data that I was barely scratching the surface on into 4GBs that I’ll actually get closer to using. I’m getting more value for my money this way, which makes it easy to justify pricey data plans.
What say you? Are you holding onto your unlimited plan? Have you made this jump as well? Leave a comment and give us your story.
Don’t miss a thing- Follow us on Twitter, on FaceBook, on YouTube or subscribe to the blog RSS feed!
image via: skattertech.com