Are you on the same cell phone plan as your parents?

[Smash255]

No, I do have a shared plan with my sister which we got in 2003 when we were both in college

[MaxQue]

I'm on the corporate plan of the family business (but I don't really own a phone, we just an old, 10 years old, cell phone in the living room and me or my mother take it when one of us need a cell phone).

[nclib]

Yes, as is my sister.

[TDAS04]

Yep.

[politicallefty]

Yes, shared plans are the only the way to get a good deal. At one point, we had five lines on one plan (my parents, my brother, my grandma, and myself). We all had unlimited data with Verizon for a total cost around something like $200/month, which was a great deal before they axed unlimited data. It's not an issue of age when you have three generations on one plan. It's a matter of saving money, where you can pay just $40/line to get a great phone with good service.

I really do think this is an American thing due to how much it costs to get a plan with the major providers (in others, if you want consistently good service). I know of people that aren't family that pool together to get a shared plan. Based on what I know, carriers charge a lot less in other countries than here in the US.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I really do think this is an American thing due to how much it costs to get a plan with the major providers (in others, if you want consistently good service). I know of people that aren't family that pool together to get a shared plan. Based on what I know, carriers charge a lot less in other countries than here in the US.

It's because carriers outside the US and Canada mostly don't do upgrades. Think of how much your internet bill would be if every two years your ISP sold you a new computer for about a third of the actual cost.

[Indy Texas]

No. Must be an American thing.

I get the impression that cell phones are nowhere near as big of a "commitment" anywhere in the world but the US. In most developing countries, you can just buy a burner phone from a kiosk and a SIM card from another kiosk and you're good to go. And I'd imagine Europe/CANZ has a bevy of consumer protection laws applied to mobile phone service.

Basically, in America, the market is dominated by a couple of integrated telecom/utility companies (AT&T and Verizon) with a handful of smaller competitors like Sprint, T-Mobile and US Cellular. AT&T/Verizon want you to consume as broad a variety of their products as possible to make switching to a competitor more difficult - this often means aggressively pushing "bundles" where they provide you with mobile phone service, landline service, cable TV service and Internet service for one monthly rate. To pad their profit margins and induce people to go this route, they make buying a la carte items like a cell phone plan for one person or a basic Internet plan more expensive.

I'm on my parents' AT&T plan, which is for everything (our cell phones; my parents' landline; my parents' cable; my parents' Internet; and all of the phone/fax/Internet service at my father's office). I've attempted on multiple occasions to pay for my part of the cell phone bill but always get the checks returned to me with "VOID" stamped on them courtesy of my dad's bookkeeper.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Actually the Canadian carriers operate even worse than the US ones. I had to deal with them a lot at my previous job, and I found out that as recently as 2010 they offered only 3-year upgrades instead of 2-years like in the US (I think they've started a 2-year cycle now, but only in 2012), despite charging the exact same types of fees and costs the US carriers do, and were still operating in the 90s with plans you could only buy if you lived in a certain province or region.

There is however an affordable route to get your own plan in North America: Go prepaid. Most prepaid carriers offer far cheaper rates (often as low as $40/month for unlimited talk and text and a decent amount of data) and don't do contracts. The problem is their coverage is nowhere near AT&T and Verizon's, and even the prepaid services offered by the big carriers (like Cricket Wireless which is a subsidiary of AT&T) run off different networks with lower tier coverage. My brother bought a very cheap flip phone under a cheap prepaid plan for his job (he does deliveries and often has to call customers but doesn't want to give them his real number), and said he only gets 3G service in the Twin Cities and up to about the middle ring suburbs on it and can't get any service AT ALL in North Dakota on it, including Bismarck and Fargo.

Also prepaid carriers rarely offer phones less than a generation old, so if you want something like an iPhone 6 or Samsung Galaxy S5 (or the coming S6), your only option with a prepaid carrier is to buy an unlocked model at full price and end up spending more than you would with a major carrier.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Also I don't know if this is true in other countries as well, but cell service taxes in the US are EXTREMELY regressive. They tend to be charged on a per line basis and even percentage based ones often have floors to them. So an affluent DINK couple with two high end smartphones, a massive data package and all sorts of additional bonus features and a family of four with two older smartphones and two flip phones used by children for emergency purposes and a much more modest data and feature plan might pay around the same, but the family will likely be paying about twice that in taxes. Now to be fair, those taxes are often logical and go to good things, most states for example charge a flat fee per line (usually not a lot, it's rarely even a dollar) to fund the state's 911 services, but it gets even worse since counties and municipalities will sometimes tack their own taxes on it but sometimes they don't, so if the DINK couple live just five miles away but in a different county, they might spend half as much in taxes PER LINE because Affluent Suburb and Affluent County gets enough property taxes to fund their budgets and don't need to tack on cell phone taxes, but Working Class Town in Working Class County is having budget troubles for that after lots of foreclosures and is worried about losing sales or angering voters if they increase the sales tax, so they just throw in some cellular service taxes that they know won't cause much outrage because how many people actually read all those sublines on their phone bills?

It's an absolute mess and the sort of thing that is screaming for a Last Week Tonight segment.

[politicallefty]

It's because carriers outside the US and Canada mostly don't do upgrades. Think of how much your internet bill would be if every two years your ISP sold you a new computer for about a third of the actual cost.

I know that was the case at one point, but is that still accurate? Perhaps, hopefully, some of our European posters can help us out here. In other words, is the trend in Europe to pay $700 for an iPhone and then pay $50/month or so for a good service plan? Only T-Mobile seems to come close to some of the best offerings in other countries.

[Cranberry]

It's because carriers outside the US and Canada mostly don't do upgrades. Think of how much your internet bill would be if every two years your ISP sold you a new computer for about a third of the actual cost.

I know that was the case at one point, but is that still accurate? Perhaps, hopefully, some of our European posters can help us out here. In other words, is the trend in Europe to pay $700 for an iPhone and then pay $50/month or so for a good service plan? Only T-Mobile seems to come close to some of the best offerings in other countries.

This probably is just the case in Austria, which evidentely has one of the cheapest overall market-structure in Europe, but for a 50€-plan you get your iPhone for free and twenty other extras you will never need. Prizes usually range from 20-30€, rarely more for a single-person plan; and you mostly get new phones on a two-year basis; such is included with nearly every but the cheapest contracts...

[Fmr. Pres. Duke]

From my understanding, you pay full price in Europe for phones but your service is cheaper and you don't have to sign 2 year contracts/phones aren't locked to a network.

Although with the new FCC law, US phones aren't locked to other networks either. AT&T unlocked my iPhone 6 for me.

[Türkisblau]

Still in high school, so definitely.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Still in high school, so definitely.

[angus]

no.  I'm not on the same plan as my wife, and she's still alive.  I don't think "cell phone plans" even existed when my parents breathed their last.

[Mr. Smith]

Yeah, and I'll probably keep it that way until:

A) I actually get married and thus probably should get a consolidated plan with whomever my wife is

B) I have a job that pays me well enough for me to move off

C) The folks boot me off early

Whichever of these comes first, but as long as I'm stuck in College, I'm doing nothing of that sort of my own accord.

[Donerail]

There is however an affordable route to get your own plan in North America: Go prepaid. Most prepaid carriers offer far cheaper rates (often as low as $40/month for unlimited talk and text and a decent amount of data) and don't do contracts. The problem is their coverage is nowhere near AT&T and Verizon's, and even the prepaid services offered by the big carriers (like Cricket Wireless which is a subsidiary of AT&T) run off different networks with lower tier coverage. My brother bought a very cheap flip phone under a cheap prepaid plan for his job (he does deliveries and often has to call customers but doesn't want to give them his real number), and said he only gets 3G service in the Twin Cities and up to about the middle ring suburbs on it and can't get any service AT ALL in North Dakota on it, including Bismarck and Fargo.

Also prepaid carriers rarely offer phones less than a generation old, so if you want something like an iPhone 6 or Samsung Galaxy S5 (or the coming S6), your only option with a prepaid carrier is to buy an unlocked model at full price and end up spending more than you would with a major carrier.

^He's right about the prepaid phones being the best deal, though I managed to get an iPhone 5S for a fairly reasonable price from Virgin Mobile (back when it was the top-of-the-line iPhone on the market). $35/month for unlimited data on Sprint's network, which isn't great but isn't usually that terrible.