This will date me a bit but i was one of the first early adopters of cell / mobile phones. I had a Motorola flip phone that will no doubt be in a museum one day if it isn't already. The battery on that damn thing lasted for about 40 minutes of talk time and the standby battery life was around 10 hours. There display had all the graphical capabilities of a calculator and the area in which you could actually use the phone was extremely limited. Basically you had to be standing next to a service tower to make a call, which was very convenient.
Even though this thing didn't really serve much purpose other than to flex on your friends who didn't have a mobile phone (which was everyone that I knew at the time,) I still felt gangster as hell because I had one. I think the primary purpose that I utilized it for was to mess with my friends and call them from right outside their house just to mess with them. This only worked once because Caller-ID was soon introduced and ruined all my pranks.
I definitely didn't need this in my life and I paid an absolute fortune for it. I think I got like 2 hours of talk time in a month and it was over $100 a month and I was on a 1 year contract. It was ludicrous.
As time went by mobile / cell phones became increasingly common and these days I don't even know anyone that has a home phone. I would say that having a mobile phone is absolutely essential these days and it shows. My question, after living outside of the United States for over 15 years is this:
Is your mobile provider ripping you off?
The problem for my friends in the USA is that you probably don't have a choice. The various companies will offer some sort of promotion but when I hear what people are paying in the states for basic data connections on their phones I sometimes laugh a bit and then feel bad for them.
Let me explain what is going on for me here in Vietnam. There are 8 mobile service providers in this country and all of them seem to have more or less the same, extremely good coverage and data speeds. I am able to tether my laptop off of my phone quite easily if I need to, and much of the time it is faster than my Wi-Fi is when I do that. Therefore, any suggestions that the speeds are crap goes out the window, at least by my standards.
Then we have the price: Most people pre-pay for service by buying credit at a minimart here. I don't know anyone on a contract. You are able to purchase as little or as much of this credit as you want. So when I first got my simcard "topped up" I decided to play it cool and put just around $10 worth of credit on it to see how long it would last. This is about 230,000 VND and i made the purchase 2 months ago.
Here is my balance today
Of the $10 in credit i put on my phone in early May, i have nearly $4 remaining and I have every reason to believe that this will last me another month.
I want you to keep in mind that I use my phone every single day just like most normal people. I listen to Spotify when I am running, I check Instagram when I am bored or in a line at the supermarket, I have multiple messaging apps and I use them as my exclusive method of communicating. I stream Youtube videos when I am in bed and before it started being useless I participated in Partiko on the go.
So how on earth do the cell phone service providers in the United States justify charging 30, 40, 50 dollars a month and up? What sort of perks are you getting out of this that I am not? It doesn't make sense to me and it seems like extortion. Not long ago there was someone visiting me from the states that rather than simply get a Thai simcard at the airport for however much money, he was paying AT&T $10 a day to have international roaming data. If he had taken a Thai simcard for $9 the data plan would have lasted him his entire stay of 3 weeks quite easily.
It might seem like I am showing off and I suppose to a certain degree I am... but I am also genuinely curious as to what reasons my American (or other places) digital pals can possibly come up with that justifies the fact that you are essentially paying many times the price that I am paying for basically the same thing?