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How we went from ¥55,000 a month to ¥18,000 a month on phone bills.

By Bill Clark on February 23, 2016

Recently, I had a serious discussion with my wife about how we are saving too little for the future because of our high phone bills. At one point, our bill came to as high as ¥90,000 for the 5 cell phones (wife’s, son’s, daughters’ and mine). Our average bill is ¥55,000 a month. I couldn’t quite get where the bulk of our phone charges are coming from.

Just like any other family living in a foreign country, we rely heavily on our smartphones for GPS, googling up stuff, texting, streaming, phoning and using FaceTime with our folks and friends back home. I know there are tons of information on how to reduce our bill but, even with the simplest data plan with a major Japan carrier could cost me about the same if not more, a month. It didn’t take me long to realize that what these Japanese major carriers do is to feed us each an unlimited data plan that we don’t necessarily need at a ridiculous rate for a 2-year contract.

Rather than wait for more shocking bills to come where my carrier benefits more than me, I immediately had to put a stop on this crazy scheme. “I’m no longer putting up with this,” I said to myself. The next day, I cancelled our subscription with the hope of finding an option that works for all of us. With a little research, I actually did.

MVNO sim providers offer significantly better rates than anything I ever thought possible in Japan.
The contract with a MVNO provider not only enabled us to keep the cost of using 5 phones down by a third of what we were paying, the lock-in term was also a year shorter. The best part is we didn’t have to cut back on our usual data use. Our plan to put away money for our rainy day fund, has become doable. It took just one weekend to part with the old phones and sign up with our new provider but it was the best weekend spent ever. Here’s what I did.
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Sell the provider-locked phones
Our old iphones were locked to the carrier. Switching to sim-only option meant we had to dispose of our old phones because MVNO sim plans using NTT network (the most reliable of all networks), work only with provider-unlocked or NTT Docomo brand phones. Luckily, we were able to find a family who happily bought our old iphones from us.

Buy new iphones.
Although a plethora of MVNO-sim compatible cheaper phones are everywhere, we decided to invest in new provider-unlocked iphones (from Apple Store Japan) mainly for 2 reasons: Iphones have better resale value and we could use it abroad as well when we leave.

Shop for a good MVNO sim plan.
Since I had to ask a work colleague to translate Japanese-only sites into English, the task of checking each provider’s data plan was the most time-consuming work of all.
NTT having the best network infrastructure, I opted for MVNO sim card providers using NTT lines.

DMM http://mvno.dmm.com

Data only plan ¥440 – ¥6,790 (1 GB – 20 GB)
Voice & Data only plan ¥2,140 – ¥8,190 (8 – 20 GB)
Credit card payment only 1 day – 12 months
Website: Japanese only

IIjMio https://www.iijmio.jp/hdd/

LTE Data only plan ¥900 3 GB
LTE Data & Voice only plan ¥1,600 3 GB
LTE Data & Voice only plan ¥3,260 10 GB
Credit card payment only
Website: English available

Freetel https://www.freetel.jp/sim/quality/

Basic Data, Voice and SMS (Pay as you go) ¥299 – ¥2,490
Credit card payment only
Website: Japanese

Biglobe http://join.biglobe.ne.jp/mobile/sim/index.html

Voice only sim ¥1,400 – ¥3,400 (1 GB – 12 GB)
Data only sim ¥ 900 – ¥2,700 (3GB – 12 GB)
Credit card payment only
Website: Japanese

B Mobile http://www.bmobile.ne.jp/

Prepaid Data only sim 5 GB (¥2,871, ¥14,723, ¥25,000) 1 month, 6 months, 12 months
Pay by cash or credit card
Rechargeable
Available at b-Market, Amazon Japan, Aeon and Yodobashi camera
Voice and Data sim subscription ¥2,780 (unlimited use), ¥1,980 (3GB), & ¥1,180 (3 GB type)
Minimum lock-in term: 5 months

U Mobile http://umobile.jp/service/sim/tsukaihodai/

LTE Tsukaihodai (unlimited )
Voice only ¥ 2980 6 months or ¥2,730 yen 12 months
Data only 2480 yen no
lock-in
Limited data
3 GB ¥1580
Website: Japanese only

Decide on a MVNO plan
After much thinking, I decided to go for BMobile’s unlimited subscription. Our monthly bills have dramatically been reduced to ¥18,000. I wish I had known about this when we first arrived in Japan.

The best part is we still get to do what we normally did when we were on our old subscription.

For streaming and tethering tasks, BMobile service needs some improvement but overall, we couldn’t be any happier with our choice.

fyi Screen shot 2016-02-23 at 12.31.05 AM