This is Alpha, the first-born, when he was 2YO.
This is Beta, the second-born, when he was about 2YO.
This is Gamma, the third-born, when he was about 18MO.
No Worries Unlimited
Nov
27
2019
We have finally joined the civilized world and switched to an unlimited cell phone plan.
I kept my old family share plan because it was grandfathered in and once I switched away from it I could never get it back. Plus, 15 gigabytes a month should be plenty for any reasonable family.
But we had been going over the 15 GB allotment the last couple months, and the overage fees were adding up. We are in a somewhat rural area and there’s no good wired internet option, so our cell phone plan is also our home internet, using a USB hotspot that’s also on the family share plan.
Anyway, I had been resisting the call of the unlimited plans because the last time I had checked they were more expensive than our metered plan. One option was to get an unlimited plan for just a USB hotspot for the laptop, but no one does that. You can’t even get just a USB hotspot on a limited plan by itself. Everyone forbids a USB hotspot as the only device in a plan and requires at least one phone line.
Except for Boost mobile, but we tried their USB hotspot and it was terrible. The device was fine, it was their signal was so poor. Then we tried a T-Mobile line and it was great. They offered a free USB hotspot for a month. Their signal was great, speeds were good. But then the trial period was over and they didn’t make it easy to keep using that device. I was ready to pay $30-$40 a month for a limited USB hotpsot plan, but they didn’t want my money.
In the end, it worked out better I suppose, since I had no other option but to switch my existing AT&T plan to unlimited. I did have the option not to switch, but after pricing it out, their new unlimited plan was cheaper than my old family share plan. Even if I didn’t want unlimited data (so as to prevent the family from becoming mindless zombies), it was going to at least save me money.
For a little while before the switch though, I did feel like such an old-timer. I reminded myself of the people who saved every little thing because they lived through the Great Depression, but I was trying to save every little bit of bandwidth. Just like it doesn’t make much sense for me today to wash and reuse tinfoil, that’s how I probably appeared to my kids. “Dad, why are you worrying about how much data we are using?” They never actually said that, but I imagined they were thinking something along those lines, since to them just about every place has Wifi and bandwidth is just not something that needs to be thought about.
Oh well.
Maybe someday I’ll tell them stories of the first couple of modems I ever used – the 300 baud, then 800 then 2400 baud modems on the family’s Commodore 64. No prefix of kilo- or mega- or anything. Just plain ol’ baud. And yet the messages went through a lot faster than some of these texts that I send these days. When I see a text taking forever to send, I’m thinking to myself “It’s only 50 bytes. At the speeds this phone can transmit at, the transaction shouldn’t even be noticeable.”
I suppose that’s the price of convenience.
They sent messages to me four times in this manner, and I answered them in the same way.
Nehemiah 6:4
