Hello
Instead of paying for separate cellular and DSL service, I’m thinking of cancelling the DSL and simply getting an unlimited data plan for my iPhone. I can already use my iPhone as a WiFi hotspot.
So what do you think? Am I ahead of or behind the curve? Is there some obvious flaw I’m overlooking?
Speed? My phone speed is craptacular at best.
i have never owned a cell phone and have no idea whether it would be useful or not.
How much data do you use and at what point does your carrier throttle it? Once you’re throttled you’ll be spending more time outside looking at the pretty flowers and nice birdies, because you ain’t getting much done online.
That doesn’t bother me. I always pick the slowest internet service I can and then enjoy saving money. When you start off with a 33.6 moden anything seems faster. 
Anyway, Verizon’s LTE is faster than my DSL.
probably depends on your carrier.
you need to figure out how quickly you’ll breach the cap, and how degraded your post cap service will be. (unlimited isn’t a guarantee…)
Maybe your router can tell you these things
streaming video is the biggest eater of bandwidth, and some cell carriers will downgrade 1080p. 1440p, and 4k streams all the way down to 480p.
also
lots of fine print. note that tethered devices tend to be capped more quickly than phones.
Personally I don’t mind 480p on my phone. 4k is, in my opinion, totally wasted on any monitor smaller than 50 inches six feet from my eyeballs.
This is literally one of my life strategies to avoid spending too much time online/consuming media at home. No cable, no wifi, phone data throttled at 3gb. At that point it’s just barely fast enough to do the “important” stuff, and provides a nudge to spend time doing something else. (Though it’s a bit shocking how much time I’m willing to spend waiting for Twitter to load some mornings…)
my cell phone currently does not have service. But it makes a useful gps device when I go wandering in the woods… Just have to remember to predownload the satelite imagery.
Also, it’s a kindle that fits in my pocket.
Currently mine is my music player.
When on holiday in Shropshire, where BT broadband sucks, I buy a month of unlimited use from Three, and get very good up and down speeds (usually around 40 down 15 up) but they are not a patch on my home connection (150Mbit/s). At home I get about 20/8 from the mobile data.
Something to bear in mind is that iPhones are not the best hotspots by far. The latest ones actually have advanced LTE turned off in the Qualcomm modems, apparently so as not to compete with the Intel ones. It would be better to buy a dedicated LTE converter which will give much better performance across multiple devices. In this country they mainly come from Huawei, I don’t know what happens in places where they have a fear of China.
As other have mentioned “unlimited” plans are often limited in some way (ie throttled) But it sounds to me like youre a light internet user unconcerned about speed, so unlimited might work for you. Personally I couldn’t have cellular-only data access because of family usage, by as a single person I could see being a “cable cutter” and going cellular.
One other alternative would be to go with a cellular hotspot device. I use Karma sometimes and I like their buy-by-the-gig pricing, though I think they recently imposed a monthly fee that makes their service somewhat less attractive.
i’m a militant non-adopter of mobile technology. i refuse to pay foe a tracking system which both governments and criminals can use to find my location and which stores enormous amounts of information about me in ways i cannot easily eliminate if it is even possible to eliminate at all. i generally use tor and a shifting group of proxy servers when i surf the net along with other practices like encrypted email and visa gift cards for purchases to reduce the amount of information available from my internet presence.
Yes. That is the case. But I don’t stream very much video other than YouTube, so I think I can live with the limitation.
But your location is surely still pretty accurately known from your current IP address, even if it’s coffee shop wifi, and meta-analysis will show that you are using encrypted email. You still have to get to that tor node.
As a result, you may become a subject of interest because of what you are doing to avoid detection. If someone walks up to my front door in daylight I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt (unless it’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses again), but if I saw someone sneaking around the one accessible part of my garden fence, ducking down to avoid detection - I’d call the police. (If they do get over the fence they’ll find just how thick our brambles are.)
my ip address is hidden by the tor server and the proxies i use.
How do you connect to the Internet?
4k does seem to be a solution looking for a problem outside scientific and medical use.
But 50 inches six feet from my eyeballs is equivalent to 5.5 inches at a distance of eight inches. (I think, I’m not very good on Imperial American Customary Units).
As a result, I find 720p a minimum and 1080p preferred for watching video on my phone at a convenient distance. Despite this when dependent on mobile data I get through around 2-4Gbytes a week. Worst case is about £20/month.
I can’t really tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on my 5.5 inch phone. I simply can’t focus on the screen when it’s that close to my eyes anymore. I like a big immersive experience, but it’s gotta work with my aging eyesight. When I deal with 4K at work, it’s typically on a 60-70 inch monitor, and I’m usually only about five feet away from it. If I were younger, it might be a different story.