US Carrier Smartphone Prices

With the recent AT&T announcement that they're going to have similar data share plans as Verizon, I've decided to take some time to figure out how much each of the four national carriers would cost for family share plans.

Some things to note:

• Even though AT&T will retain their current family share plans prices and not force you to this new data sharing plan when you sign a new contract, I have not included their current pricing in this comparison chart.
• T-Mobile's data plan is actually "unlimited"; that is to say, you can use more than the 2GB limit in your billing period and won't be charged extra, however, your data beyond 2GB will be throttled (slow).
• T-Mobile's non-contract prices should be lower. I did not check what they would be, however.
• Under the new data share plans for both Verizon and AT&T, text and talk are both unlimited. So technically, the equivalent plans for T-Mobile and Sprint are their "unlimited talk" plans. However, Sprint offers "any mobile"--That is to say, with Sprint, you can call any cell phone number in the US (or receive calls), and talk for however long you want, and those minutes will be free and not part of your allotted "any time" minutes. So unless you make a lot of calls to landlines, you won't need that many minutes, making it almost the same as unlimited talk. YMMV.
• These prices are for smartphones only. Since we're mainly concerned about the cost of data, non-smartphones need not apply. I'm also not taking tablets into account.
• Verizon's data share plan also includes "free hotspots"; I don't know if AT&T's new plan does the same, but Sprint and T-Mobile both charge extra if you wish to turn your phone into a mobile hotspot.

P.S. I don't know why the header has "pHones" instead of "Phones"; I swear they were fine when I created the file in Excel. Somehow in the conversion to Google Docs, they decided to change which letter to turn into upper case. Don't know how that happened.

It's the end of the world as we know it

I stumbled upon this while going through some of the new sites at YTMND--it's several days old, which means my online sources have failed me!

It's a phone recording between a Verizon Wireless customer and Verizon's customer service supervisor, and said supervisor's floor manager. You can read about the whole ordeal on the blog he set up after the call, VerizonMath. Looks like Verizon has finally resolved the issue.

Cliff's Notes on what happened:

Guy is going to Canada, and called Verizon to see what their Internet rate would be.
Verizon rep tells him it's ".002 cents per kilobyte."
Guy gets bill, and finds they've charged him ".002 dollars per kilobyte."
Guy calls Verizon again, but no one seems to understand the difference.

That's the gist of it. If you don't have the time to listen to the whole thing, you can also get a really condensed version here (it's the YTMND site I mentioned).

It's incredible how Verizon's CSRs can't seem to comprehend grade-school math. Maybe they've become too reliant upon calculators and computers (The problem, of course, was that they let the calculator do all of the work for them, but the calculator can't keep track of your units, so when they pressed the equals button, they just assumed that the answer would be a dollar figure, when in fact they haven't done the conversion from cents to dollar yet). I guess if too many idiots rely on machines to do things for them, our civilizations will decline and decay, and morons will rule the earth.

Below is a simple conversion chart to illustrate how the math should be done, if you're the sort that has problems with keeping units straight.