woodstock
Final Approach
Hi
Not sure who may benefit from this information, but here goes:
Prior to August-ish of this year, Sprint offered a 40 dollars a month all you can eat Internatioanl Data Roaming plan. This is separate from their international voice plan, which I also recommend when traveling.
They realized they were getting eaten by data charges so they discontinued it. It was a great plan, because you could pro-rate it. In Europe for 15 days? 20 bucks. 3 days? 4 bucks. etc.
I called this morning to see if I could re-activate the plan for an upcoming trip. I was hoping they would grandfather me in or something.
The lady today told me that they would put me back on it this time, but, my choices are:
1. keep it forever at 40 bucks a month regardless of whether I travel or not.
2. use it now, but once discontinued that's it - no going back.
Interestingly enough, she told me that a megabyte of data is 16 bucks, and my average use is about 4 megs a month. In July I was in Italy/Switzerland for 15 days and that month used 6 megs. That makes sense b/c I wouldn't have been online as much, but I had the berry with me.
Long and short - if you know your typical data usage, 16 bucks a meg isn't awful. In the scenario above, 3 megs during the two weeks overseas (and probably more, because I probably used more in Italy and less when back home) would have come to 48 bucks versus the 20 bucks I would have paid on the data plan.
Yes, it would have cost more for that trip, but, now that Sprint makes you decide to stay on forever OR go to the regular data roaming, unless you travel monthly it's cheaper to just pay when you go.
JUST DO NOT VIDEO STREAM!
Not sure who may benefit from this information, but here goes:
Prior to August-ish of this year, Sprint offered a 40 dollars a month all you can eat Internatioanl Data Roaming plan. This is separate from their international voice plan, which I also recommend when traveling.
They realized they were getting eaten by data charges so they discontinued it. It was a great plan, because you could pro-rate it. In Europe for 15 days? 20 bucks. 3 days? 4 bucks. etc.
I called this morning to see if I could re-activate the plan for an upcoming trip. I was hoping they would grandfather me in or something.
The lady today told me that they would put me back on it this time, but, my choices are:
1. keep it forever at 40 bucks a month regardless of whether I travel or not.
2. use it now, but once discontinued that's it - no going back.
Interestingly enough, she told me that a megabyte of data is 16 bucks, and my average use is about 4 megs a month. In July I was in Italy/Switzerland for 15 days and that month used 6 megs. That makes sense b/c I wouldn't have been online as much, but I had the berry with me.
Long and short - if you know your typical data usage, 16 bucks a meg isn't awful. In the scenario above, 3 megs during the two weeks overseas (and probably more, because I probably used more in Italy and less when back home) would have come to 48 bucks versus the 20 bucks I would have paid on the data plan.
Yes, it would have cost more for that trip, but, now that Sprint makes you decide to stay on forever OR go to the regular data roaming, unless you travel monthly it's cheaper to just pay when you go.
JUST DO NOT VIDEO STREAM!