What am I doing wrong?

What am I doing wrong?

As a family I think I am spending way too much on wireless phones, internet and cable. What are you guys doing?

We have verizon for (2) iPhone 4s and (1) iPad mini and after I trimmed down from 8GB to 2GB (I never used more than 1.8GB and Verizon happily left me at 8GB) I was able to trim from $220 to $170 per month. But still that is nearly $60 per device.

I also have (1) iPhone 4 and 1 vanilla Motorola phone on an At&T plan for $90 a month.

Then the home cable & internet is with AT&T and we just trimmed the download to 12MBs and dumped almost all the channels to the one-step above basic. But they charge for everything with surcharges and it is still coming out to $170 a month.

So all combined my minimum bill is now $420, and was over $500 per month. I honestly feel stupid. I cannot believe that ~$5,000 of my post-tax income is going to these telecons for moving bits around.

How can I do better? What do you guys do?

MetroPCS has the best prices but does not seem to support even iPhone4s. Google fiber is coming to my neighborhood sometime in 2014 - should I just suck it up and wait until then?

Besides Bee Cave Games, I have an LLC wrapping my boat as a chartering business, should I get a small business package for my house? Or should we get a small business backpage for Bee Cave Games and extend to all the employees some sort of wireless benefit?

This seems so brutally expensive. Why couldn’t a bunch of neighbors go in together and buy a nice fat business connection, and then just setup up a bunch of wireless routers and extend it through the neighborhood?

Building on that, why isn’t there yet an open-sourced hacker movement to put a bunch of wireless networked routers openly through the urban areas with no fees? The hardware is what ~$50 per 10,000 square feet of coverage?

Any and all advice is appreciated.

-Erik

Originally posted on Facebook on November 27, 2013.