Ting

I highly recommend Ting for mobile voice, text, and data service. Here's my referral link: zt8dmb3oh19.ting.com

In March, 2015, I activated my new OnePlus One on Ting's GSM service, running on T-Mobile's network. I was excited to switch from corrupt, coercive Verizon to Ting! So far, it has been a wonderful experience.

I already had a Ting CDMA hotspot for a few months, running on Sprint's network. It works much better than the hotspot built in to my old Verizon Android phone, and costs much less, even though the Verizon phone was on a flat-rate data "plan"!

Ting offers tiered pricing. Not the fake tiered pricing offered by the major carriers, where you must try to guess how much data you use, so you always pay for more data than you use, and then as you use more, the price goes way up!

Instead, Ting charges monthly for each tier of usage, 0.1 GB, 0.5 GB, 1 GB, and 2GB, each tier costing a bit less per byte, combined across all of your devices. For usage over 2GB, each MB is charged at a fixed rate. Even if you use a lot of data, the rate is 1¢ per MB. (Ting reduced their data rate by a third in August, 2016. When was the last time one of the dominant carriers did that?)

Ting costs less than my long-grandfathered flat-rate Verizon "plan" for several reasons:

• That old Verizon "plan," no longer available, is expensive to begin with, as expensive as 4 GB usage at Ting's rates, and I don't need that much. Current Verizon "plans" are even more expensive.
• Verizon bundles the data service with very expensive voice and text service I hardly use.
• Verizon requires every device to have its own expensive "plan."
• And several times a year Verizon finds ways to completely screw me over, which has an incalculable cost to my sanity.

Ting's tiered voice and text rates are similarly low, fair, and not at all coercive.

And Ting has great customer service. I do worry that won't scale as they grow, but Ting's marketing presents a committed message, and Ting has the resources of Tucows behind them, so I hope they'll keep up the good work.

I worry that Ting will get taken over by Google. That'd be a shame. I was a customer of Clear.com (a WiMax home internet access provider), and I was very disappointed when they were taken over by Sprint. I hope that doesn't happen to Ting!

The one drawback is, of course, coverage. The CDMA hotspot has relatively solid coverage, since Ting is using Sprint's network. But because the OnePlus One phone uses Ting's GSM service, on T-Mobile's network, the coverage is occasionally spotty, even in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I spend most of my time. (Update March, 2016: Ting helped me tweak the phone settings, and now the GSM phone has excellent coverage except in the Santa Cruz Mountains when I drive over Highway 17.)

In a pinch, I fire up the CDMA hotspot to provide WiFi to the OnePlus One. I can even make calls over Google Voice that way. But it's not a seamless experience.

Verizon's coverage was far more extensive. Why is that? Is a coercive business model necessary to pay for a solid network? I hope not! (I've never tried AT&T.)

For now, the coverage holes aren't a problem for me. And I sleep better knowing I'm fairly well insulated from the worst practices of the big carriers.

I haven't taken full advantage of the freedom of Cyanogen on the OnePlus One yet. I haven't installed my own build, run my internet access through firewalls and VPNs, or denied some apps permissions they demand. Out of the box, the OnePlus One feels just like a Google phone or tablet, so I am surveilled continuously by Google, a far more savvy enemy of privacy than the big carriers can ever hope to be. That's inconsistent of me, and I'm not proud of it, but I feel I'm getting closer to good digital hygiene in a political and commercial environment that doesn't make it easy.