Unlimited Data and the iPhone 5
I am lucky enough to be grandfathered into an unlimited data plan on Verizon. The downside to still having this plan, is if I want to keep it I had to pay the unsubsidized price for the iPhone 5 when I upgraded. After having LTE in the new iPad for the last few months, with iCloud services all turned on to use cellular data, I noticed my data usage on the iPad would register on average 50 MB on days I never even touched the device. I assume this is mostly due to iCloud Documents & Data syncing as I make changes to data stored in iCloud using my Mac or iPhone (iA Writer is one example of such an app).
Instead of upgrading my iPhone at a discounted price, then upgrading my data plan to the 5 GB plan ($20 more a month, for a total of $30 more over a 2 year contract when compared to buying the 16 GB iPhone at the retail price of $649.99.) and monitoring my data, I opted to pay full price.
Since making this decision, I have been nervous I made the wrong decision. I feared my data usage would end up under 2 GB a month, and the upgrade price would have treated me just fine in the long run.
I just checked my usage, and was a bit surprised at what I found.
Here’s the breakdown of my data usage for the first 15 days of my bill cycle, using the iPhone 4S on 3G and then the data usage total over the last 11 days on the iPhone 5 and LTE:
- First 15 days of billing cycle (iPhone 4S): 0.34 GB
- Next 11 days of billing cycle (iPhone 5): 1.24 GB
For the last 11 days I have used the iPhone 5 as I used the 4S, on Wi-Fi for the majority of the day during the week, with LTE usage sporadic through out the evening and most of the day on the weekends as we are out and about doing weekend-type activities.
It’s going to be interesting to see if the increase in data is to blame on the bug Verizon and Apple tried to fix earlier this week, or if my iPhone usage habits have been influenced by the addition of LTE. I’ll update with next months usage, which hopefully will provide a better look into what’s causing the increase in data usage.
But, for now, I’m feeling good about my decision to keep the unlimited plan.
