Hold the Phone: An Experiment in Carrier Cutting 📴📵✂️

A smartphone plan for a single line these days typically runs at least $80 / month after taxes and fees. But if you spend your life in front of wifi, then what are you really getting for this money?

For my case, I’m in front of my wifi connection about 92% of my life. Another 6% is spent exercising, where I’m not really checking my phone. Practically speaking, I’m spending roughly $80 a month for the privilege of being able to surf the internet the remaining 2% of my life, generally at a grocery store or stuck in traffic.

Fed up with this inefficiency, I decided to create the concept of carrier cutting. A couple of months ago I hatched a plan to completely cut myself off from my phone plan and see whether I could still live a happy and reasonably well-adjusted life.

The “No Cell Plan” Plan

The thrust of this adventure was to maintain most of the important elements of a traditional phone plan while seeing how low I could get my costs. To do so, I chose a mixture of a few platforms.

Though I’m hardly Mr. Popular, I still wanted to keep my phone number in case anybody tried to text or call. For this I chose to migrate my number to Twilio, one of my favorite services that allows you to manage phone numbers programmatically. The ability to manage my phone number with scripts and computer code is basically a superpower, yet not something you can get from any of the Cadillac-priced carriers.

One thing I wouldn’t be able to get with Twilio was a platform to actually make and receive phone calls. I looked at a few options, but decided to start with Google Voice because it could work on both mobile and desktop, and importantly, was free.

Finally, I wanted to give myself some basic connectivity in the event I was out and about or if, shocker, my Xfinity connection cut out. Here I chose to use a T-Mobile Coolpad Surf for a few reasons, but primarily because there happened to be a promotion where they were giving them away for a one month free trial. After this, the data only plans offered by various providers for a couple of gigabytes a month are incredibly cheap relative to their full-fledged smartphone plans.

You could argue that I’m not technically carrier cutting if I have a relationship with T-Mobile— but if you wanted to be so pedantic as to try and make this argument I’d just use my aforementioned Twilio powers to filter out your calls.

These three elements combined, and I more or less have a mobile phone that functions just as normal. It’s always got internet connectivity, either through my home network or a wifi hotspot when I’m out and about. With a little bit of coding, I can get and receive phone calls and text messages as usual, they just happen to go through the Google Voice app instead of the iPhone’s native phone app. Everything should just be business as usual, right?

Solution + Costs:

• T-Mobile: $10 / month data plan
• Twilio: ~$5 / month
• Google Voice: ~$0

A Good Call

Some aspects of this have been very good. The ability to have programmatic control over my personal cell phone is incredible. I tend to get a lot of spam calls, so it’s nice to whitelist the real humans but route unrecognized phone numbers to a voice prompt to first confirm their awareness that I’m on the do-not-call list before they get patched through.

Another thing I didn’t realize was that most text messages these days don’t go through the SMS network. I was quite surprised when most of my messaging worked even before I set up my programmatic setup. The iPhone doesn’t bother sending it through the costly SMS network if it’s sending to another iPhone, it just sends directly through iMessage. This cuts out what was, at one time, the most expensive means of transferring 1's and 0's.

Overall, I’d say about 90% of things have gone according to plan. Great, right?

Poor Reception

There’s been a few things I didn’t anticipate that have been less than ideal. Some are recoverable, but others make me wonder whether I’ll need to give up and go back to a phone plan.

For starters, the experience of owning a T-Mobile hotspot has been absolutely horrible. The company prides itself on having no robotic customer support, but they don’t have enough humans willing to take the robots’ jobs. The typical wait time to talk to one of these much-ballyhooed humans was about 1.5 hours.

This was especially problematic because they also didn’t seem to plan for users like me who kicked their phone plan but kept their data plan. For the first several months there was no capability of logging in to their website to do things like view my usage or even pay my bill, actions which were key components of my plan. It did finally get resolved after a marathon 3 hour phone call, so we’ll see if this is better going forward. I’m already on the market for better wifi hotspot plans though.

Google Voice has also been a bit buggy, occasionally dropping calls or failing to connect. Mostly it’s been serviceable, but who knows how long before it hits the Google Graveyard. Find somebody who looks at you the way Google looks at half-heartedly tiptoeing into a market only to exit a few years later. I may move elsewhere shortly, as this is doubtless not a permanent solution.

However these piece of the puzzle are inessential, since they can easily be replaced by making the according adjustments to my Twilio code. While Twilio is great for providing this level of flexibility, there is one notable shortcoming: short codes.

Short codes are not supported by Twilio, presumably because they are operated directly by the carriers. So what’s the big deal? Unfortunately, I didn’t realize how many services are dependent on short codes for things like two-factor authentication. Some have workarounds like authenticator apps or voice support. Some patch you through to their fraud department, which makes otherwise simple tasks like paying your bills take a couple of hours. Some services have absolutely no workaround, so I was forced to stop using their apps and thereby deprive them of my invaluable advertising data.

When to Dial Back

Having done this for a few months, what is next? To be honest, I’ll probably stay without a phone plan going forward. As I write out more and more codebase to operate my own personal switchboard, it’s unlikely I’ll ever be willing to go back to a phone solution that lacks programmatic support.

The ability to use some of the services that require short-code support is a drawback, but I don’t particularly feel I’m missing out on anything. After all, the average person doesn’t download any new apps in a given month, and I’d wager I’m far below average on this front.

Besides, if lack of short code support gets to be too big of a nuisance, I can always find somebody and offer them $10 per month to add a number to their existing plan, just for the ability to try out random apps. But then there’s something of a chicken and egg problem in how would I could find such a person? Tinder would be the optimal way… but they won’t let me on the prowl without a short code enabled phone! We may be entering an era in which natural selection optimizes for those with the best smartphone plans.