What can you do with T-Mobile's "Free Data For Life" plan?
T-Mobile has been issuing a press release claiming that with the purchase of a cellular-enabled tablet at a select Walmart store, you can receive data for life! Sounds great! Except, in reality, it is barely enough 4G data for anyone looking to possibly stream a movie, stream any music and/or email attachments multiple times.
If someone purchases a cellular-enabled tablet on T-Mobile’s 4G network, that person will recieve up to 200MB of free 4G data every single month for the entire duration of the tablet’s life.
“With these great connected tablets, you get free 4G data for the life of your tablet on the blazing fast T-Mobile network – and the freedom to live your life beyond the Wi-Fi zone – at an unheard of price.” – Doug Chartier, senior vice president, T-Mobile.Again, the implication is that someone could live off the 4G network without Wifi. Except, how much could someone accomplish online with 200mb? According to MobileOffice,
A 200 MB data plan would cover in one month: 1,000 text emails, 50 emails with photo attachments, 150 emails with other attachments, 60 social media posts with photos uploaded, and 500 Web pages viewed. Streaming media and downloads of apps or songs would increase the usage over 200 MB in this scenario.
EdibleApple decided to find out how long they could use Netflix with a 200mb data plan:
“Watching an 22 minute episode of Arrested Development via Netflix uses up about 55MB of bandwidth therefore
- An hour-long TV show (~43min.) on Netflix would consume 110MB of data
- An hour-long movie on Netflix would consume 150MB of data
- An hour and a half movie on Netflix would consume 225MB of data.
Translation? If you’re on AT&T’s $15/month plan, then you want to avoid streaming Netflix video at all costs.”
Just last month, Verizon itself deemed 1GB-per-month to be “light browsing” when picking one of their data plans:
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