To help you find the best deal for your family, Consumerreports.org, figured out the service-cost breakdowns for one to five family members for light, medium, and heavy, data service and each carrier stands out for different reasons:
- T-Mobile's Simple Choice offers the best prices, and it was a solid performer in their recent cell-service survey of 58,000 subscribers in 23 metro areas. The carrier recently announced a plan to lure customers from rivals AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon by paying off the early-termination fees
- In their survey, Verizon's Edge Share Everything was the most satisfying among the Big Four, and it was a standout for data service and resolving customer-support issues.
- Also according to survey respondents, AT&T's Next offered the most problem-free high-speed 4G data service, something to consider if you're a heavy data user.
- Sprint's Framily plans are good deals for groups of people living at different addresses—five people in one "Framily" would each pay just $55 a month for unlimited, voice, texts, and data. But the carrier ranked near the bottom in many of the metro areas of their survey.
Choosing the right cell phone plan can be puzzling. These days there are so many different choices in the areas of pricing, data, talk minutes, text and then on top of all that you have to decide what cell phone you want to get it all on. Whistleout.com made a short checklist for anyone looking to sign up to a new contract.