Cheapest 3G In The Us?

[quadomatic]

I was trying to find cheap 3G in the USA for use with the Pandora, but there don't seem to be many cheap options.

AT&T used to have prepaid 3G with GoPhones, only $20 a month. Unfortunately that's gone now.

Virgin Mobile seems to be the only one offering prepaid 3G, aside from Cricket Wireless. Virgin is $10 for 100MB (10 days), $20 for 300MB (30 days), $30 for 1GB (30 days), $40 for 5GB (30 days). Cricket is $40 a month for unlimited.

Clear offers 4G for $40 a month (I think), but it's not compatible with the Pandora.

Anyone know of anything cheaper? I was thinking about getting the dumbphone $10 a month data plan add-on for my cellphone and popping the SIM into a AT&T Laptop Connect card, but I'm not sure if that would work (and I would have to get a dumbphone). I think it would work, but when they realize I'm not using it on a dumbphone, they may get angry.

 

[KRH]

I have no experience with such things but A look at the providers web pages shows this.

Cricket - $480 annually for "unlimited"
~Unlimited is 5gb of downloads a month.
~Exceeding this will reduce your bandwidth but you can still use the service at a slower speed.

Virgin Mobile is $480/720 annually for 1/5 Gigabytes
~System requirements does not list Linux, so support may or may not exist.
~3g dongle doubles as a micro SD reader.

Either way you loose a couple Franklins a year and have to deal with bulky dongles.
Remember to consider things like service in the area where you live, and previous experiences.
(I assume 30 days is a month, because I'm too lazy to actually calculate the price for each month)
(All things are to my understanding from reading their advertising laden web-pages, I have not read the fine print.)

 

[Twiitcher]

I did some research on this before I purchased my phone / provider. I found that the most cost effective solution for me for mobile telephony was $60.00 bucks a month, using Tmobile (coverage is fine for me NE US), 5 faves and 300 minutes monthly(one of those faves is my google voice #) so basically unlimited minutes, 400 messages and unlimited web access (since the phone I use (Sony Ericcson TM506) is just a feature phone. I can tether to it using my laptop assuming that will be possible with my Pandy. The breakdown = $35.00 for phone w/5 Faves, $15.00 for the messaging and $10.00 for the web access.

To summarize I have unlimited talk minutes (using google voice is necessary), 400 messages, and unlimited web access for $60.00 monthly. The fact that I can tether via bluetooth or usb cable = good deal for me. speeds aren't terrible. I believe 800Kbps down and 220Kbps up.... Howard Forums - TM506 <------details on phone and 3g tethering with TM506.

The key is getting a feature (not smart) phone that has 3G and will allow tethering. The TM506 is the only one I found that fits the bill. Other 'feature' phones have only edge support for web access which is terribly slow. Tmobile will not allow $10.00 price point to be used on 'smart' phones.

 

[VRAndy]

It looks like Cricket's data coverage map is laughably poor. (Big cities only, but not Boston or New York ) Too bad, because that plan KRH described (Unlimited, but throttled after a point) sounds very fair.

 

[quadomatic]

It looks like Cricket's data coverage map is laughably poor. (Big cities only, but not Boston or New York ) Too bad, because that plan KRH described (Unlimited, but throttled after a point) sounds very fair.

Works for me, got it in Chicago. Cricket advertising is all over the place here.

Unfortunately, the price does not agree with me. For that price, I could go with Clear, which is WiMax, so I'm betting it's considerably faster.