Going Mobile: Our yearlong experiment without cable internet

This month our smartphone using, Netflix-streaming family of four wrapped up a yearlong experiment in cable cutting. Mainly it was just my wife and I, since all our toddlers had to give up was the PBS-Kids streaming app. With our hotspot enabled smart phones and their 8GB of data, we weren’t exactly off the grid, but it was certainly an adjustment.

My wife and I are pretty typical Millennials when it comes to internet use. We were both early adopters of smartphones, and pretty invested in an all-digital, paper free lifestyle. We don’t have a checkbook, because we pay all our bills online. We don’t own a printer, because we never print anything besides baseball tickets. We also went two years without a DVD player, because, who needs one with Netflix and Hulu?

Despite all this, when our monthy Comcast bill hit $65, it was just too much and we told them to turn it off, we would just get by using hotspots from our LTE smartphones (4GB each, plus unlimited music streaming).

There were a lot of positives to this arrangement.  Obviously, we saved $65/month. With all that saving and without constant access to Netflix, I felt free to simply buy any movies or TV shows I wanted to watch, usually on eBay for <$5. This let us see beyond Netflix’s generally terrible movie selection.  The extra step of clicking on the hot spot also made us stop to think before jumping on the computer, and overall we wasted less time idling ‘surfing’.

On the other side of the coin, I often found myself using my phone when a full size computer would have been much easier, simply because it was already connected and the mobile sites use less data. Running out of high speed data on the last day of the month and getting bumped to ‘super slow’ while trying to pay bills was also annoying. I also had to give up online gaming, although I rarely have the time anyway as working dad and homeowner.

The working part is what finally forced us to end the experiment. I was assigned a new role at work, and working from home when needed became an expectation. My corporate laptop never did work consistently with the LTE hotspot, and when it did, the enterprise systems and layered security chewed up far too much of our precious data plan.

So, while the last year proved that it is possible to get by on only a few gigabytes per month without going back to the dark ages, it probably just isn’t worth it for most people. If you never work from home, can live without streaming (or have a data plan that includes streaming of your favorite site like T-Mobile did a few months ago), and are willing to work around some inconvenience, it’s a way to save a fair amount of cash. On the other hand, if you can afford landline internet (and its available in your neighborhood), it still offers a convenience factor and some extra capability that mobile plans just can’t match. Not yet, anyway.