T-Mobile Simple Choice Plans

[brijar]

I just recently noticed T-Mobile's new cellular phone plan here:
http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/family-plans.aspx

I'm curious what you all think about it. I've never been a fan of cell phone contracts. Paying over $50 per month for service for one phone is a nightmare for me. And almost all cell companies force you to buy data if you're going to use a smartphone.

I currently buy service from Page Plus, which is a company that uses Verizon's towers (and some Sprint towers) and sells service in a prepaid or monthly fee fashion. I am on their "standard plan" and buy an $80 PIN from them which puts $80 on my account. They deduct 4 cents per minute I use and 5 cents per text sent or received. If I use any data, that costs $1 per MB (which is incredibly high, so I just don't use cellular data). I attend a university with campus wide WiFi, so I use Pinger on my HTC EVO 4G LTE (bought off-contract on Craigslist) for the large majority of my texts. For the past two years, I've only had to buy an $80 PIN once every six to eight months or so (roughly $12 per month). This system has worked alright for me, but I would enjoy the ability to send and receive as many texts as I want without having to be connected to WiFi. But it isn't worth much more than $25 per month to me. I think I would be fine without any cellular data, since I don't use any right now.

The things I like about the new T-Mobile plan are that there doesn't seem to be any overages as long as you don't make international calls. You can't exceed their unlimited minutes or texts and when you run out of high speed data, they simply throttle your data to 2G speeds. The price is quite reasonable for 4 or 5 phones ($25 or $22 per phone per month, each line gets 500MB of 3G/4G data) for what they advertise. Their coverage isn't super impressive, but there are no roaming fees (though they may cancel your service if you roam A LOT). Page Plus charges me 27 cents per minute for calls while roaming. They do restrict you to 10MB of roaming data, but then they just turn roaming data off after that. No overages that I can see. And, the icing on the cake: they don't make you sign a 2 year contract. From what I can tell, you can cancel the service at any time without an early termination fee.

So, I'm just curious what y'all think about this plan. Maybe I'm crazy and it's perfectly reasonable to pay the cost of several flame sticker brand batteries every month for cell service. The only problem I have with it is that I'll have to get a GSM phone and find three or four other guys to split a plan with. And we'll all have to have the same area code, so someone might have to change numbers.

Thoughts?