There could be great many factors that will define the carrier of choice for each person, from equipment availability to the reception in customer’s house, but leaving all the particulars aside, today T-Mobile offers by far the best value on the market. If you are not afraid of buying your equipment from a third party, you will have a phone you like and a very compelling voice, text and data plans. The main weakness of the network is the weird 3G frequency, limiting the choices available and the cost of entry with unsubsidized phones. Adding more lines is often also least expensive with T-Mobile.
Verizon is the second best value in family plans, although it is considerably more expensive than T-Mobile. The company did its homework and knows what it has to offer.
AT&T would be the most expensive again, had it not been for ridiculous cost of Sprint plans. There are price gaps as big as almost $50 between its plans and text and data are only available as options (for example unlimited messaging for a family plan is $30 a month).
Verizon let go of the expensive and limited market Canadian plans for its Family offerings, but AT&T stays the course. There are more plans the company has, going up in price as far as $319.99, but we will leave these remaining AT&T Canada plans alone. The value of all these offers is highly questionable and the target audience relatively small; why AT&T has as many as six expensive plans is a mystery, but maybe we do not know much.
Sprint clearly does not need family business. The plans are very expensive, not able to compete even with AT&T. In case you wonder, unlimited talk, text and data plan from Sprint costs a whopping $75.24 a month more than a similar offer from T-Mobile. Yes, T-Mobile does not have Direct Connect and you’d have to pay full price for the phone, but over 24 months duration of Sprint contract it is $1,805.76 difference. This is a lot of dough; you can buy some very nice phones with it and still have some money left for ice cream. The cost gaps between Sprint plans are big, up to $45. Unless you must have Direct Connect there is really nothing to look at on any price level.
We did not review MetroPCS here as the company has no family plans, but to compare two individual plans with all the unlimited talk, text, data, etc you can chew including all the taxes would set you back $100. This is cheap. Very cheap. As we mentioned in the Individual plans article however, the choice of phones is poor and they are not free.
As for the overall market, we feel that the price war is far from over and before the end of the year we may see more price reductions from everybody, specifically on data. This will in turn have an interesting effect on your home internet provider, just like reductions in cellular voice traffic cost made a huge impact on your home phone company. Don’t you just love to live in a technology era?
In the meantime, we will be observing the new developments, analyze them and bring you quarterly updates, hoping our work will help you to choose the carrier and plan fitting your needs and budget the best.
Labels: Mobile operators
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