About 13-14 months ago, my wife and I were boondocking in the Southwest. She was working remote, I would be on my phone maybe 3-4 hrs / day, and then maybe an HR or two of Netflix at night. Not sure what plan we had, but we had an ATT chip that cost us $70-something a month. Everything worked fine.
Ready to hit the road again, and I see ALL plans are much higher. We are using 600-700GB a month (which seems to be the average couple’s usage in the U.S., according to AI). In order to cover that, the plans I see for 500-1000GB are about $175/month. What happened? Am I just missing something here?
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More or less, that’s the standard price. 6-700GB per month in a non-fixed location is difficult to manage for mobile network operators (MNOs) as far as capacity is concerned. If you look at fixed plans, you can get “unlimited” in a single location for $50/month. We actually have someone using these SIMs to pull an aggregate 7TB per month with no issues. When you move around, streaming Netflix on a coverage tower (one with low capacity, designed to cover previously ‘dark’ areas) is a burden for the cell site and the rest of the users on that cell site. Beyond making a profit and paying bills, the MNOs have one real reason for charging a high amount for non-fixed data packages like this: it discourages users from creating issues with capacity and, if you do, you pay a significant amount for it.
FWIW, $175/month is a good price for 700GB of usage. You could get multiple SIMs and use Peplink’s features changing SIMs based on data usage to maybe get a little bit lower cost, but it would be more or less the same. FWIW, not all carriers even offer this amount of data, or you’re paying $2-5/GB over your allotted amount.
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