Be aware of bait and switch advertisements
You need to be very careful not to believe all the advertisements you see. I have been tempted to upgrade my phone at least once a week with some seemingly great data offers.
Let’s take an advertisement claiming they will give you up to a year of data usage free if you buy your dad a new smartphone with a qualifying talk plan.
T-Mobile is advertising a Father’s day special: Just “sign up for a qualifying unlimited talk, text, and data plan” this Saturday June 18, and get free data for a whole year. It sounds like a great promotion.
It is a great promotion. And it might be a great thing for your father if he does not use the data plan. If your dad uses the web or watches movies or tweets and updates Facebook all day long, this is not the offer for him.
The problem is that the only “qualifying” data plans are the ones that are 200 MB or less! So if your father starts using the phone on Sunday and starts viewing movies and browsing the web, immediately go on line and change his data plan.
T-Mobile has its own data calculator so you can figure out your data usage. So let’s estimate some data usage. By the way, I have checked this calculator by having a few friends estimate their data usage with this data calculator and they all say it comes out very close to their actual usage.
If your father listens to just 10 minutes of streaming music a day, he will use 300 MB of data! So if he listens to the radio, he will probably listen to the radio on his phone now. If he has an MP3 player and wants to use his new smartphone to play tunes from his Google or Amazon music locker, up the data plan. Just an hour a day will use up 1.6 GB for the month!
If your father views just 40 web pages a day, he will exceed his data limit by 11MB. Viewing 325 web pages a day will take up 1.67 GB for the month.
If your father just watches 10 minutes of video (probably a couple of YouTube laughing babies) a day he will be using 900 MB! If he looks at video for just one hour a day, he will use 5.27 GB.
Just ten pictures of his grandkids a day will use 900 MB. Just 10 downloads of apps or music will use over one GB.
If you father does all of the above, he will use over 10.7 GB per month!
And this does not even include email!
T-Mobile has a 10 GB data plan for $119.99, so you had better order that for your father if he is data savvy.
For moderately computer literate fathers, you will probably be safe with the 2 GB or 5 GM plan.
Do you know anyone who has a smartphone who can live on 200 MB a month?
Now, T-Mobile does not charge you any overage charges once you reach your plan limit. They just throttle down the data to a v e r y s l o w speed, so you really will be forced into the next higher data plan. This looks like a classic case of bait and switch where you are forced to make the switch.
If this was another vendor that has caps on their data plans that also charge for overage usage, your father (or you if you are so kind to pay for dad’s phone) it could be a way to get a bunch of data overage charges.
So check out those tempting advertisements or you may just be in for some trouble.
Photo from Flickr – Credit: HuntFishGuide
