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Get the Best Cell Phone Plan for Your Family—and Save up to $1,000 a Year
Update ½/15: The Big Four carriers’ shell-game-like pricing practices have become so convoluted, you need an accounting degree to decipher them. They continually shift prices up or down according to the number of phone lines you need and the amount of data you’re purchasing. They further complicate matters with “special” short-term offers to lure customers from rivals. We’ve decided to omit these specials from our calculation tables because of their extremely short lifespan and their fragility (deal benefits often vaporize when a customer buys a new phone or makes other changes). Here’s a rundown of the major carriers.
T-Mobile. T-Mobile doesn’t offer data-sharing cell phone plans. You have to purchase data for each phone in your household. But this carrier, whose prices are among the best, continues to frequently either lower prices or offer more services at no additional cost. For instance, streaming music and movies from Pandora, YouTube, and other popular sources doesn’t count against the customers’ data allowance.
Sprint. Among the Big Four carriers, this carrier has the most convoluted phone access fees: $20 for one phone using 1 GB of data; $25 per phone accessing 2GB to 4GB of data; and $15 per phone accessing data buckets 8GB or larger. Also, Sprint prices have actually gone up by a few dollars since the fall. But the beleaguered carrier does have one of the cheapest options for data hogs: It charges only $120 a month for 4GB of data (excluding $15 per phone access fees).
AT&T. This carrier has widened the chasm between its small and large data buckets. The next-size data bucket up from the 5GB plan ($50 month) is a 15GB plan ($100). Also, the $25 access fee AT&T charges per line drops to $15 when customers buy a data plan of 15GB or larger. That means AT&T customers feeding three or more phones may actually save a few bucks by buying more data than they need.
Verizon. Big Red keeps things simple: It charges a flat $20 for every phone tapping into its sharable data plans. But it recently made things a bit more complicated—at least temporarily—by throwing in an additional 2GB for customers who choose or upgrade to 12GB of shareable data. If the offer is still there when you’re shopping for a phone, by all means take it.
Often, we steer people away from that kind of arrangement, but in this case, the pricing should work out well for a lot of consumers. Let’s crunch the numbers for someone who needs just one phone line. With All-In, you can get a 16GB iPhone 6 and use it for two years for $1,920 (that doesn’t include the activation fee.) The same phone and 24 months of service would cost $2,210 on the company’s 4GB Family Share Pack data plan ($65 a month, plus about $27 while you paid off the phone, which costs $650).
What if you keep your iPhone for a third year? All-In will end up costing $2,880 ($80 per month for 36 months). If you have the Family Share Pack, the monthly bill will drop to $65 after two years, once the phone is paid off, but the total for three years is still higher, at $2,990.
That doesn’t mean the All-In is better for everyone. You need to do some arithmetic to get the best deal. If you need multiple phones, the price-per-phone drops for most plans, but not for the All-In. You can economize on data usage to bring costs down on most cell phone plans, but not the All-In. And if you keep a phone you’ve paid off for a fourth year, trade it in—or just decide to sell it on eBay—the numbers change again.
Update 2/5/15: Thanks to price-war incentives and greater plan flexibility, there are more opportunities now to save a few bucks on the new, no-contract cell phone plans from AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless—a.k.a. the Big Four.
These cell phone plans separate the purchase of the phone from the service charges, effectively giving you an interest-free loan you can pay off in about two years. When you’ve paid off the phone, your monthly bill goes down accordingly. And there are no termination fees; if you want to leave the carrier, you just pay any remaining balance on the phone.
Although our recent report, “Small carriers outrank the big ones in Consumer Reports’ latest cell phone service survey,” covering 63,352 subscribers in 26 metro areas, found some very happy customers who switched to smaller cell providers, there are still good reasons for staying big.
Verizon, for example, earned decent marks across the board for voice, text, and data service, while AT&T was a standout for its 4G service. It recently slashed prices on its More Everything plans, added more data tiers to allow customers to better fine-tune plans, and monkeyed with the access fees it charges (for a limited time) to lower costs further.
T-Mobile was tops for value and customer service. And Sprint, which didn’t do particularly well in any category, has recently become very aggressive about pricing—and some people actually do like the company.
Thinking about changing your wireless company? We’ll help you find the best cell phone carrier.
Unfortunately, these plans are rather complicated, and the carriers have done their best to make apples-to-apples comparisons difficult among one another’s offerings. For example, they charge different rates for additional phone lines, break data allowances into chunks that don’t match the competition’s, and provide differing discounts for multiple phones. In fact, plan pricing is so bizarre and counterintuitive that customers, particularly those with multiple phone lines, can often save money by buying more data for each phone.
The good news: We’ve already done the math for you in the tables below to help you find the best deal. And to make sure your needs are covered, we’ve presented the service-cost breakdowns for one to five family members for light, medium, and heavy data service. All you need to do is figure out how much data your family needs, which we also help you do in “How much service do you need?”
Looking to save money on your Internet, TV, and home-phone service? Here’s how you can create your own triple-play bundle and save money.
T-Mobile Simple Choice
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Number of people
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1GB of data per phone
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2GB of data per phone
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6GB of data per phone
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|
1
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$40 (prepaid only)
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$60
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$65
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|
2
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NA |
$80 |
$110
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|
3
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NA
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$90
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$135
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|
4
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NA
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$100
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$160
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|
5
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NA
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$110
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$185 |
Sprint Family Share Pack
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Number of people
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1GB of data per phone
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2GB of data per phone
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4GB of data per phone
|
|
1
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$40 |
$55
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$75
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|
2
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$85
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$100
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$100
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|
3
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$125 (1.3GB)
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$115 (2.7GB)
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$165 (13.3GB)
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|
4
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$150
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$130
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$180 (10GB)
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|
5
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$145 (1.6GB) |
$175
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$195 (8GB)
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AT&T Next on Mobile Share
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Number of people
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1GB of data per phone
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2GB of data per phone
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4GB of data per phone
|
|
1
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NA
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$55 (3GB)
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$75 (5GB)
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|
2
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$80
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$100 (2.5GB)
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$130 (7.5GB)
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|
3
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$105 (0.67)
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$125 (1.67GB)
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$145 (5GB)
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|
4
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$150 (1.25GB)
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$160 (3.75GB)
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$200 (5GB)
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|
5
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$225
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$175 (3GB)
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$215
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Verizon Simple Plans
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Number of people
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1GB of data per phone
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2GB of data per phone
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4GB of data per phone
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|
1
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$50
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$55 (3GB)
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$80 (6GB)
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|
2
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$85 (1.5GB)
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$100 (3GB)
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$120 (6GB)
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|
3
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$105
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$120
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$140
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|
4
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$140 (1.5GB)
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$160 (3GB)
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$180 (4.5GB)
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|
5
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$160 (1.2GB)
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$180 (2.4GB)
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$220 |
Note that in comparing rates, we couldn’t always find perfect matches, but we used the most similar plans.
For instance, AT&T, Verizon, and now Sprint sell their data in chunks that can be shared by all the phones on one account, while T-Mobile requires you to buy data plans for each phone. So we selected sharable data plans that matched (or came as close as possible to matching) the per-phone data plan of T-Mobile.
Then there’s the question of what happens if you don’t use your full data allotment. T-Mobile and AT&T both provide ways for you to “bank” unused data from your monthly allowance for later use. With the T-Mobile Data Stash plan, you get a “gift” bucket of 10 gigabytes of data per phone line, plus the ability to roll over unused data into the following months—it just needs to be used within a year. The AT&T Rollover Data offer is more stingy. There is no data bonus and you have to use rolled over data by the end of the following month.
Another adjustment: T-Mobile offers unlimited data plans, while AT&T’s and Verizon’s plans cap off at 50GB, and Sprint’s at 60GB, at rates well north of $200. We determined that 4GB to 5GB per phone would be comparable to having unlimited data, for most users.
—Mike Gikas
How much service do you need?
1. First see whether a 500MB to 1GB data plan is enough for you. It will be for many consumers, especially if you confine your cellular-data activities mostly to browsing the Web, using news and e-book apps, and sending and receiving e-mails without large attachments. Save video calls, media streaming, and big-file uploads for when you have Wi-Fi access.
2. If you stream a fair amount of music and video on the road, such as during your commute to work or on business trips, you’ll probably need 2GB to 3GB per month.
3. If your eyes are permanently glued to Netflix, YouTube, and other data-draining activities, you might want to consider a high-limit or unlimited data plan.—M.G.
If you’re thinking about what your next smart phone should be, check our cell phone buying guide and Ratings.
Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright © 2006-2016 Consumers Union of U.S.
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