Cell Plans Revisited

There is still a lot of confusion here about cell phone and smartphone plans--- I get a lot of questions.

Simply put,  where you have Wi-Fi, you don't need any plan with an unlocked phone.    Phoning can be done with Skype,  Hangouts,  and Duo,  along with other such applications.   Free.

Away from Wi-Fi,  a  $10 a month phoning only plan should suffice for most.     Good plans are available from Republic Wireless, Pure Talk, FreedomPop, and many others.

If you need more than phoning,  such as music or photos or ebooks and documents, these can be put on your phone in advance, to use anywhere without online access at all.

Only at the point where you need to access email and web sites and traffic information,  realtime, do you need so-called data.   That add-on cost comes separate from and additional  to just phoning.

Data is included in many more expensive plans automatically and is what boosts the costs,  such as to $40 or more per month and upwards.     Most of us don't need that much data.

Data use is measured in gigabytes and the going price is $10 a month per gigabyte.

You don't need much data for traffic only, which is indeed invaluable to have using the Waze app. You don't need much for emails, though messaging does not even use data..      You don’t need much even to download Kindle documents such as newspapers..    

Alternatively,  video uses a huge amount of data such as three gigabytes for a single movie.    Avoid using data that way.     Just put the movie in the cell phone's memory ahead of time, using Wi-Fi.  Make sure you have plenty of cell phone memory,  however.

For most seniors,  a fraction of a gigabyte should suffice for a month with a plan costing  little more than $20.  You heard right, $20 a month.