When considering a cell phone carrier these days, the lines are often blurred between saving money and picking the best cell phone. Well, thankfully, BillShrink is working on this for us and has broken down the cost of ownership between all four carriers when owning the respective Galaxy S device. T-Mobile often comes out ahead in these head-to-head matches. In this particular instance of the comparison, T-Mobile actually ends up tied on the lower end of the rate plan scale and the least expensive when things start going unlimited across the board. Check on the minimum plan which for T-Mobile is $79.99 a month compared against $69.98, $79.99 and $54.99 for Verizon, Sprint and AT&T respectively. Granted, the AT&T plan comes with only a measly MB of data and neither Verizon nor AT&T come with messaging. Add that in and they are more expensive than both T-Mobile and Sprint. When considering AT&T, one must take into consideration a 250 MB plan as power users will likely hit those numbers before the end of the month and would rather have the advantage of an “unlimited” plan and less concern for overage.
When going unlimited across the board, there is the exception of Verizon only offering 5000 messaging against unlimited messaging for T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T. Five thousand messages may seem like a lot, but in the days of actual “unlimited” messaging, anyone with a teenager knows that 5000 messages is often just not enough. When we break things down, T-Mobile comes out $255 dollars cheaper than Sprint, $325 less expensive than AT&T and $445 dollars cheaper than Verizon. Over the cost of a 12-month period, that’s not a bad savings and shows T-Mobile continues to maintain its industry position as a value leader.
