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Only Two Reasons for iPhone Users to Stay with AT&T

If you’re an iPhone user, you’ve been bombarded with complicated comparisons about which carrier to stick with or switch to. If you haven’t already, make sure to look over this beautiful chart by entrepreneur Matt Galligan, which breaks down each carrier and each phone’s DNA for you, according to each rate plan.

This post is for current AT&T iPhone users. I’m writing this to share an opinion, and that is there are perhaps only 1-2 legitimate reasons you should stay with AT&T for your iPhone service. Otherwise, in 95%+ of cases, AT&T users should switch to Verizon, and here’s why:

  • AT&T’s use of the term “unlimited data” is confusing on a few levels. First, after you reach a certain gb/month usage, they will “throttle” or limit your data. They do this on top of their crappy network performance. Second, you should pull up your yearly data usage on AT&T website and see how much you really use. As someone who uses my iPhone all the time, I was shocked to know that, even in the highest month, I didn’t even touch a gb/month — it was only 850mb.
  • [To pull your own AT&T data usage, log into your AT&T account on web: Bill&Payments > Bill&Usage Reports > choose “Report” field for web data & set time. This will pull a graph for you, and you can see how much data (likely to be in mg not gb!) that you use historically, and call help you gauge what the future will hold for you.]
  • For what my AT&T data patterns are as a power user, some of the plans Verizon offers are virtually the same price, though their pricing segmentation is more confusing for shoppers. And, you do get some added benefits, such as unlimited talk time and the ability to tether service from your phone to create a WiFi hotspot.

So, there are only two reasons why one would want to stay with AT&T, and those are:

  1. You need the ability to talk and surf the web and use apps at the same time. For many, this is critical because of the nature of their work to be on the phone and/or in the car often.
  2. You are concerned about using data that goes over your allotted plan. This would trigger a $15 fee per gb, but you could also change your plans. This is more about piece of mind knowing that your data will truly never go up in price.