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Top 5 US Cell Carriers in My Pocket

 

I carry the top 5 US Carriers in my pocket. Watch and listen now to find out how.

Working remotely has taught me the importance of redundancy, especially with mobile internet carriers.

What about you?

In this brave new remote world, what are you using to stay connected?
What’s your connectivity back-up plan?


Services:
Google Fi: https://g.co/fi/r/3KV5WJ
Visible: https://www.visible.com/

Transcript:

Dave: Today, I want to talk about how I carry all five of the major us cellular carriers in my pocket. Before we get into that, if you guys don’t know, my wife and I have worked remotely as we’ve traveled around for the last three years. So I normally find myself doing things like working from coffee shops and working from libraries and borrowing lake houses on the off season and working from where they are, where the internet may or may not work on any of these things. And over the years for a bunch of reasons, have found that it makes a lot more sense to carry my own cellular devices with me so I can do business and talk to you great folks. And then a special shout out to Zach from SquadCast. We had a conversation a few weeks back. I was sitting in a lake house in Alabama and he asked how I was having this video conversation,

Dave: and I told him and he said it was really interesting and suggested I share it. The first step that I have, for my main cellular cell phone on my number is Google’s Project Fi. We’ve had it for about three, I guess coming up on four years. it’s worked really well for us for a couple of reasons. It has Sprint and T-Mobile and US Cellular and honestly we’ve used all three of those depending upon where we go. The main part about why I love Fi is because it allows me to make phone calls through wifi, either through my phone or through my laptop or iPad, which is super beneficial. Overall, we love that, and the Google Hangouts integration, if you’re coming at this in 2020 or beyond, it may not necessarily be your best step, but for us, we’re about $50 or $55 a month in that for our main services.

Dave: And then I have two SIM cards on my Pixel 3AXL. The other SIM card is a Visible SIM, which is an offshoot of a Verizon brand. Their shtick is that it’s all online. They send you some cards, they’ll sell you phones, all of that stuff. And I end up paying 25 bucks a month out the door for that. All of my services are MVNOs, and that basically means that none of the people that I currently pay for cell phone service or data actually own it. They buy it through the other five services. So on my phone, I’ve got Sprint and T-Mobile, Verizon and US Cellular and that works really well the majority of the time. Netgear jetpack that currently has an AT&T service on it. And if you guys are like me, you’re going to be like Dave, why would you possibly want AT&T service?

Dave: In lots of places, especially down South and out West AT&T has surprisingly good service, and because they aren’t known as well for great service and reception like Verizon, there are some places where we’ve been that we could only get AT&T service, some places that we’ve been that we can only get Verizon service. When you travel around, it becomes important to have a lot of redundancies. This we’re currently getting through a service called OTR Mobile, but I wouldn’t suggest doing that. There are a lot of changes going on with AT&T and their services and I’m sticking with this for probably a couple more months until we figure out what happens. I spent a lot of time even before starting to work remotely trying to figure out what the best service is for us in order to stay connected as we travel because staying connected is so important.

Dave: I’m going to go ahead and drop some links below so you guys can see what I use. I think there’s a Google Fi referral link. I think that’s the only one of these services that now offer referral links. Generally we’re very happy with them. Price point wise, we’re $125, $150 bucks a month at the moment, which is a lot better than I know some people pay for their normal monthly internet and generally we’re in the 750ish gigabytes a month of data. We use a lot of data. I’m interested in what you guys are using for data. Do you have one service? Do you have multiple services? Are you looking at multiple services? Have you recently been pushed to work remotely and because of that, need to look at additional backups and redundancies. Drop a comment below. I’m interested in what you want to know and I’m interested if you guys want to know more content about how I stay connected in the middle of nowhere, talk to you soon. Buh Bye.