Data Blindness

My lack of foresight has come back on me.

Earlier this year, I was looking over the account info for my cell phone plan. I was paying $30 a month for data service for my smartphone, but I wasn't using all that much data. In the time since I'd gotten the phone, Verizon had added the option of paying $15 a month for a smaller data allowance.

I thought about it and, even though paying the cell phone bill was not a hardship, I figured saving that $15 a month would still be nice. I looked at my data usage patterns and saw that I had not exceeded the amount being offered at the lower price, so I made the switch. I figured if I went over, I could switch back.

I did go over my data cap (150 megabytes) in July when we went to New York, because I was using the phone's map capability a lot, plus looking up other assorted info on the web and checking traffic on the drive down. But worse, now I have an iPhone, which means I'm using data on the network a lot more, to do stuff like play Scrabble with a friend in Texas.

But there was one aspect of the data plan I did not take into account. When I had signed up for the smartphone data plan, Verizon was still offering unlimited data at that $30 a month. At some point after I'd switched to the lower amount of data, the unlimited option had gone away, but customers who still had it were grandfathered and allowed to keep it, at the same rate.

When I made the decision to downgrade my data plan, I already knew at that point that I was going to bail on that phone as soon as I was able, but I still didn't take the long view of my future wants and needs. Had I just left the plan alone, I would now have an iPhone with unlimited data access for $30 a month. Arrrrgh...

Today I checked my usage for the two-plus weeks since I got the iPhone, and I could already see that I was going to pass the cap before the end of the billing period, so I switched back to the $30/month plan, but for that I now get 2 gigabytes of data. It seems unlikely that I would exceed that, but it wouldn't have mattered—I could have streamed Spotify or Pandora 24/7 without caring about my data usage. That stings.