A Little Tip To Save Money On Cell Phone Bill

The major point: If you want Verizon service, get a tablet and use google voice + hangouts app.

Hey everyone, so this is my first post here, hopefully not my last. I plan to start my trucking career around mid march of 2016 after I finish my fall semester and half of my spring semester (flex classes, only 8 weeks long instead of 16).

I was just reading a rather old topic (something like 1 year 6 months since the last post) about cell phone carriers.

for pretty much all of 2013 and 2014 I was in a federal volunteer program called AmeriCorps NCCC. got to travel and see a lot while gaining some decent job skills... and I got to drive a lot. One of the major "frustrations" of being in AmeriCorps NCCC is the very low pay, they covered my food, housing, fuel, etc but anything personal such as a phone bill came out of your own pocket which was "filled" by the living stipend. you can call it a paycheck that we got every 2 weeks, but the govt doesn't because then they would have had to pay us min wage. The net pay for me was about $165 bi weekly... yeah I don't wanna hear it about how truckers don't make much, I may have only been doing 40 hours a week on avg (more if you count my extra volunteer work, over 2000 hours worked in first 10 month term and about 1920 hours in my 2nd 10 month term) but I was working hard as hell most of the time.

Anyways because of the low amount of pay we corps members had to get creative with paying bills and me being the tech type that I am excelled at this. My first year I had tmobile. it was ok when my projects (feel free to ask me more details on AmeriCorps terms I may use) were in decent sized towns but in the rural area not at all. take for example project #1 was all over eastern MD... Amish country area (mmm remembering some Amish made doughnuts I had). Cell phone service for tmobile was horrible. round 2 I was in NJ... around the NYC area... service was great. to make a long story short I learned tmobile sucks when it comes to coverage outside of medium to big sized towns.

my 2nd term of AmeriCorps I still had tmobile but through net10 (that change happened mid point of 1st term but it was still using tmobile service). coverage was ok at our base of ops except in our dorm, pretty much had to go outside to get service. well early into training my phone broke and since I wasn't on a contract I decided it was a good time to find something better. our team leaders are given phones to use on verizon service and in my prior year they had coverage every single place we went (except the farm land area of new bedford, mass... no one had covg there and our proj sponsor recommended we either turn phone off or onto airplane mode when at housing), it wasn't always super strong but it was there none the less.

So now onto the important bit. I wanted Verizon service because I could see from covg map and from previous year's experience it was probably going to be my best bet for coverage. The price though was some serious shock to me. A lot of you probably don't realize this because you just bite the bullet and pay your bill, but part of your verizon bill is a fee based upon the type of device you have. for a smartphone it's $40 per month, for a tablet it's only $10. think hot spots and dumb phones are like $5-$10 too.\ So finding this out I did my research and found I could get a tablet and only pay for a data plan and use the data with VoIP. I do this through google voice. My phone number is through google voice. I use the hangouts app (android of course) with a dialer addon that google made and I can make and recieve phone calls and the same for sms. Plus because it is a tablet with gps I can do navigation to, then it does pretty much everything else a smart phone does. Every so often I have to use a 3rd party app to fool the playstore into thinking it's a phone because some app are not designed for tablet so it won't let you download them normally. but that's a minor issue.

So here we go I have a tablet (currently a Samsung Galaxy tab II) I paid like $200 with a 2year contract (which ends march of next year) and my service is $40 ($30 for the plan $10 for the device fee) per month plus the usual taxes and stuff, comes out to like $43 a month. I have 4gb of data. In AmeriCorps that doesn't go as far as I like so I had myself on a 6-8gb plan, it's like $10 for every 2gb of data till 10 gb then it's like $10 for 5gb more. In AmeriCorps I didn't always have wifi or sometimes I was to lazy to go where the wifi was so I would often max out my data and have to raise the limit BUT it was not because of my phone calls or sms, that actually only accounts for maybe 10% of my data usage. Now that I'm home where I have my desktop and laptop computer with home internet and internet at college I have myself on a 4gb plan and use on avg 3/4 of it at most. it just reset today and I used 3.1 gb for last month, mostly because I updated a bunch of apps over the 4g signal instead of wifi and I watched several youtube videos.

So yeah the too tl:dr (too long didn't read) is if you want verizon service, get a tablet and use google voice with hangouts, much cheaper than a smartphone and works just as good.

If you have any questions about this or comments post a reply and i'll get back to ya asap.

Sorry for the very long drawn out post... I talk a lot in real life too.

I'm in the Midwest and have US Cellular. Verizon is not an option for me as I had a major dispute with them when they decided my mom, daughter and I (we shared a plan) owed them $1000 out of the blue. We fought, and won, but now Verizon will no longer accept me as a customer lol. I personally think USC has better coverage in Amish country; the only time I've been without service was when I was "way down in a holler" and NO ONE has service "down there," lol.

I have not been outside of Missouri or Iowa lately, though. I'm wondering how their service is in other states?? In Missouri, I have service even when in an area shaded as "no coverage" on their map.

I know the part of Maine I was in in late 2013 was a major market for US cellular.. I think they also had a market for a good portion of eastern CO.

There's actually an area of TX I went to where AT&T was the only carrier with service. I went camping in Camp Wood, TX back in April and because it's such a rural area only AT&T had service. Not enough people for Verizon to invest building or leasing a tower.

When was the last time you tried to get Verizon service... maybe they have forgotten by now haha.