Any hexbears do this? I need to get rid of shitcastinfinitynbcuniversalmeglocorp asap and I narrowed it down to two choices:
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Minternet mint mobile home internet & mint mobile phone plan. I can get Minternet router for 6/12 months prepaid and mint mobile unlimited plan for my iphone for $45 to $50 month for a year. I am planning on moving next year hopefully by June and I’m not sure where yet and I don’t know if it will roam or if I have coverage after the move. It’s the cheapest home internet and phone plan but prepaid and might not work where I’m moving.
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Google Fi. I can get a Pixel 9A and two years of unlimited internet which is actually 50 Gb phone data and 50 Gb hot spot data for the same upfront cash outlay as Mint mobile and then $55 month for two years. I need to keep it for two years for the $55/month because google cyber monday deal is cost of the phone($400) and $240 off google fi for two years. The $640 deal is spread out over 24 months with $27 off a month. The $55 month google fi plan over two years includes the cost of the pixel 9A but have to keep google fi for two years to get that price.
No matter what scheme I come up with internet access and phone will come out to $50 +/- $10 so this isn’t a financial question. What I am wondering is if I can use a pixel 9A to stream 50Gb month and use it as my primary phone. I see a lot of people saying the battery will go bad since I am using a pixel as a home router. Mint mobile solves home internet and phone for a year and no 50Gb home internet cap and google fi solves home internet and phone for two years with 50Gb home internet cap. The reason I’m posting this in Technology is I need to determine if pixel will last two years as a router and main phone. Also muh eyes are bad and I can only use phone for bank/bills/email/sms but cannot surf internet without using laptop or desktop so hotspot/tethering is a must and because I live in a capitalist society I have to make a decision TODAY (cyber monday).
1 would probably be the safer bet assuming you’re staying in the same country (all bets off if not). I’ve used tethering a phone as a back-up in emergency situations and if you’re frugal with data and just need to get email, visit some social media without too many media embeds (Hexbear/Lemmy probably okay, tiktok not as much), etc you’ll be fine but 50GB can run out remarkably quickly while regularly streaming video on desktop at 1080p or 720p quality. Youtube is fairly optimized in terms of limited bitrates for their video so regular hours a day watching YT each month might be doable (not sure, could come close or go over) but I would say if you want to do Netflix, HBOMax, Hulu, or other streaming services that they tend to use more bitrate than youtube so you could pretty easily exhaust that 50GB in under a month, Prime video even worse as because Amazon runs their own infrastructure their video bitrates are 25-50% higher than most other streamers.
I would see if you can figure out how much data you used last month, many routers have a section where this is available and some ISPs can answer that as well (if you do call instead of checking online just don’t tell them you’re asking to price out a competitor plan, make up some nonsense about worrying about activity on your network or something and wanting to know just to check if it seems okay). If you can establish you normally use around 50GB a month then you know 2 is in theory viable even if not what I would choose, if you know for example your usage is 100GB a month of data then you know you’d have to really cut back on some things.
I had 2 mint mobile plans with 15 Gb/month for total 30Gb/mo and I tethered and hotspotted it for 6 months until I bricked an old pixel 1 because of battery issues. Pixels are a lot better now but 6+ hrs of surfing a day is still probably an extreme use case. Routers have better thermal design and much cheaper to replace. I can also download occasional vids, movies and new linux distros onto a usb stick at the library which is only a few miles away. I just don’t have a lot of confidence that a mobile phone can handle it every day many hours for two years. Starting to lean towards mint internet and mint mobile for phone.