I have an iPad Mini 5 that I use as my primary computer when I travel. I got the version with a cellular modem so that I can use it anywhere without having to worry about finding WiFi. This is not my first iPad with cell service. My original iPad had a data plan. Back then it was so simple. There was no commitment. It was month to month. I turned it on for a month when I was traveling. I turned it off when I was at home where WiFI is everywhere.
Last year I was out of the country for a good chunk of a month with a domestic data plan that did me no good. However my iPhone Xs with its support for a second eSIM worked great. I used GigSky and bought just the data that I needed. I ended up having just a tiny bit of the pre-paid plan left over. I wished that such a plan were available in the US.
I looked at my data plan to see what I was spending. What struck me was how much my $10 plan was actually costing. Our state sales tax rate is 6.25%. City and local sales taxes add up to another 1.75%. That is just a fact of life. The sneaky part is the extra 3.54 that AT&T stuffs in the bill with fancy descriptions like “Administrative Fee”, “Regulatory Cost Recovery Charge”, and “State Cost-Recovery Fee”. Since sales tax is being charged on these items, they are not taxes, but just income streams for AT&T. So the bottom line in that my $10 data plan costs $13.54 per month. That $3.54 adds up to an extra $42.48 per year.
These extra fees vary by type of device. I was a bit shocked to learn that my watch had the most fees but the least tax. I’ll need to look into that as it makes no sense.
| Class | Monthly Charges | Surcharges & Fees | Government taxes & fees | Total | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wearable | $10.00 | $4.00 | $1.02 | $15.02 | $180.24 |
| Tablet | $10.00 | $3.54 | $2.02 | $15.56 | $186.72 |
| Phone | $15.00 | $4.09 | $2.09 | $21.18 | $254.16 |
Like a lot of people, I have been basically home since spring break. I am still paying for this service. AT&T will let me pause the service so long as I keep paying the full monthly charge. If I cancel the service and then decide to turn it back on, there’s a $40 fee (plus fees, I’m sure) to activate a “new line”. So it makes no sense to pause server for less than 4 months. It also makes no sense to keep paying $15.56 every month and not use it. It looks I only used about 370MB of data this month. Obviously I can do without.
As a result of this review, I cancelled my AT&T data. But that’s not the end of the story. I mentioned eSIMs above. The iPad also uses an eSIM. It has a physical SIM slot but it is empty. The search was on to find an eSIM that could do domestically what GigSky did for me in South America. More on that later.
Comments are closed.