re: AT&T ups the ante - Will offer of the cheapest family plans starting Feb 1st

Verizon is still worth the extra money to be able to use the phone and internet in an extremely crowded place like an lsu or saints game. That pissed me off when I was with AT&T.

Looks like my wife and I are still cheaper on tmobile

If this is the plan I read about yesterday, there is a catch. When your contract is up, you can no longer receive a subsidized phone. You either bring your own phone, pay full price for a handset, or go to AT & T Next. With the monthly cost of Next, your bill would be back up where it was before. Major tech sites are calling it a Trojan horse plan to get people to move off the subsidy model.

Yep .. Apparently, no $199 new iPhone upgrades on this plan .. You pay full price ... eBay used phone sales will explode ..

At which point my wife will have to give up her iPhone and move to a Nexus device.

Yeah .. I knew there was a huge catch to this ...

My Verizon contract is up next month, kinda getting tired of $100 for just me but it is their old unlimited data and minutes that I never gave up years ago. No idea what I'm going to do in the next couple of weeks, shopping around to find a better deal. VZW won't come down on their price because it's a grandfathered plan.

You are gonna end up paying the full price of the phone either way.

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Is the ATT Next a good option? Seems like you pay monthly for the devices rather than up front.

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ATT NEXT plan is an inherently evil plan that is designed to make ATT lots of money at your expense. I don't want to get into what makes it evil, but you can read all about it here.

But there is a way around it:

Under the NEXT plan, if you upgrade your phone after every 12 months, you have to trade in your old phone to get a new one (you can't sell your old phone to pay for a new phone). The $325 or so payments you would have made towards that phone in one year goes down the drain if you do that. It is almost like leasing your phone.

However, with ATT now offering to take off the monthly payment once you have made the NEXT payments for 20/26 months, you have a chance to own the phone out-right at the end of 20-26 months. Personally I would do that, because at the end of about 2 years, I still have a phone that I could sell for $200-300 on Ebay or Craiglist or at the very least give to a family member, or if I decide to keep it, my monthly bill would go down by $25-35, because I have already paid $650 in installments to ATT which is the true cost of the phone.

$400 Nexus 5 32GB (or $350 for 16GB) Unlocked Phone that I can jump from no contract provider to no contract provider whenever I want FTW. at all the poors who can't buy a phone outright and then pay more for it b/c of subsidies.

Cell phone system here is complete shite btw. Pay a fortune for slow service. Europe and Asia pay a fraction of what we do and have much faster speeds.