Mint Mobile Data Limits and Reduced Speed Data

I used up all my Mint Mobile high speed data. Once I used up my high speed data, I was still able to connect to the Internet, but at significantly reduced speed data. Mint Mobile like many other prepaid wireless carriers provide customers with reduced speed data for the remainder of their plan once they use up their high speed data.

Reduced speed data is really slow and the your options using it are very limited. Still though, its better than having no data at all. With reduced speed data, I was still able to send and receive email, run my navigation app, Waze. I was able to browser some websites, extremely slowly. Most importantly, I was still able to use Apple’s iMessage which relies on your internet connection to exchange messages with other Apple users (your blue bubble crowd).

Mint also has the option to buy more high speed data if you need it. You can add 1GB of data to your account for $10 or 3 GB for $20. I decided to tough it out on reduced speed data for the remainder of the month just to see what it was like.

With all that is going on in 2020, my cell data needs are really low. I mostly rely on Wi-Fi at home. I didn’t encounter one annoyance. I went to a CVS store to pick up some items but I was unable to use their app to access my loyalty card. I had some extra bucks to use up but couldn’t do it. When I ran the CVS app, it notified me that would have to download the update to use the app. Because I didn’t have cellular data, I couldn’t update the app. CVS does not have customer Wi-Fi. I think what is most annoying was that none of the features of the app could be used without the update. Hey CVS how about at least displaying my loyalty card barcode even when an app update I required.

So how exactly did I run out of data less than one month on my new Mint Mobile plan. Podcasts. Turns out I have sometimes been downloading podcasts when I go out the door and using cellular data instead of Wi-Fi before leaving. This was totally avoidable. I knew I was doing it. My previous plan had 6GB of data per month so I was getting a little lax about not using cellular data when I could easily do this on wi-fi.

I made a couple of videos about measuring and using reduced speed data. You can see them below. One thing that I caught me off guard is that even though Mint was reducing my speeds, the T-Mobile network they use does not reduce the speeds when you use the Speed Test app. So I ran it expecting to see reduced speeds, yet I was measuring very fast speeds. I wasn’t aware of this.