What would be the advantage of paying extra for this plan vs. just streaming off a cell signal?
A lot of Texas is ATT country, Verizon doesn't work as well. My daughter has ATT, I have Verizon.
I tried the Iphone to HDMI thingy. There is a security protocol that has to be overridden. It seems they are attempting to keep someone from playing a subscription movie to a recording device, anti-piracy thing. Of course that was two years ago for me, so things may have changed.
Unlimited plans, what a crock. It's like saying you can have all the water from the faucet you want, so long as it is one drop at a time. After your GB monthly limit you're throttled to 640K or .65 MBS it takes about 2 MBS to stream, slowly, with buffering.
Finding Verizon plans. The plans change frequently. The discounts are hidden. The VZ stores get different information than the VZ telephone staff. Neither know what is on the VZ web site. I've used VZ for over 15 years. Up until about 5 years ago streaming wasn't very viable, just not enough fast throughput, so I rarely got close to using my GB Monthly Hot Spot allotment. When we did start streaming I very quickly exceeded the allotment and had to put up with very slow web page loading. But things are better now. In most places I get at least 2 mbs throughput, and near cities I can get 50 mbs throughput. So we started streaming, which meant that I had to upgrade my plan.
That's when I started finding out about the hidden discounts. I am a vet, discount. I am a senior, discount. I have 2 Iphones, 2 Apple watches, Ipad, 2 laptops, and an Xbox. The watches share with the Iphones, $8.50 each per month. I Ipad has an Unlimited Plan, $8.50 per month. My wife watches a TV show on it that I don't like and reads her book on it. It has a 15gb per month cap. Both the Iphones are on the 5 Get More plans, $80 a month each. They have 50 gb Hot Spot Limit, unlimited on device data. I exceeded the phone hot spot limit one time and got throttled, don't know if that was a mistake or what, it was weird. I have a discount for automatic payment. Inlcluded in this plan is Hulu, Disney +, Apple Arcade, Apple Music. Lesser plans they charge around $10 per month. I expect this will change, it looked like a promotional thing, but we are enjoying Hulu and Disney +. This plan also gives me a 50% discount on watches/tablets/mifi devices. Which brings me to the last device, our Mifi wireless router. A little dohicky that acts like an computer wireless router but gets it's internet connection through cell towers. I have the Pro plan that gives me 100 gb per month of hot spot. But with the high end cell phone plan it's 1/2 off, or $17 per month.
Total bill runs me around $250 a month. Getting all this together was very painful and time consuming. I talked with at least a dozen VZ persons and none of them had all the correct information, or maybe they were throttled also and only allowed to give out a little bit of information at a time.
Coverage. In 2011 when we started full timing you could usually make a cell phone call near most cities, not in the rural areas, not much data. Now, we can stream most places we go. When T-Mobile and Sprint merged there coverage improved quite a bit. Since I don't use them I can't really speak to their coverage. ATT has come a long way also, at one time I had my wife on ATT because there was a big location difference in the services. Some places we went ATT was the only thing working. But then we were going places ATT didn't work, so back to VZ. VZ works everywhere we go, where there is any kind of cell service. And we still go places where there is no cell service at all. A lot of the coverage thing is location, some stuff works really great in the east, not at all in the west. Some works around cities, never in the rural areas. The coverage maps are a general guideline. There are web services that show cell tower strength, they are hard to find. I used them when I was spending a whole summer in an area with poor service to optimize my cell service. I haven't had to do that in a couple of years.
Claims about the best. Myself included. I have read many stories about how great this or that service program coverage plan is. You have to be careful, becuase these claims work for the person telling it. What's not included is location. Where do these people travel and stay. Is it just one area? One route? or do they (like me) rove all over the country. Just this last year I have been spent weeks in Washington, Utah, and South Dakota. In the near future Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, then Florida. Next summer Vermont and NH. My VZ is poor in north TX.
There is a lot to this connectivity thing. And more coming out every day. Good luck in your hunt.
Fortunately, the vast majority of our time - when we're not in transit - is spent in more populated areas where the infrastructure is more robust. We're typically getting 20 - 30 Mbps download speeds here at APG in Maryland (similar to what we were getting in Las Cruces last winter).
