DutchEagle
Well-known member
John Canfield said:Yes, it's for data. I don't understand the relationship between the VZ hotspot and using your phone as a hotspot. Could you elaborate?
I know it sounds confusing, this is what I understand;
You can still use your phone as a hotspot but it counts against your Verizon phone contract data usage. The FMCA plan is separate from you phone contract. You cannot add the MiFi device to your
Verizon phone contract (technically you can but that defeats the FMCA plan) and cannot add your phones to the FMCA plan. Your phone contract has no relation to your FMCA data plan, it is a plan from FMCA using the Verizon network. You pay FMCA, not Verizon like you do with your phone.
My setup would looks like this:
Phone with Verizon (For others this could be a AT&T or other plan) that I will scale back to 3GB/mo as the lowest data rate because I would use my phone as a hotspot only in very rare occasions. So I pay Verizon for this plan.
Hotspot with FMCA, connecting up to 15 WiFi devices (Connect your phone's WiFi to it also like you are at home regardless of which provider you have) The hotspot is like a wireless router you have at home but is connected to the phone tower instead of a physical broadband cable or DSL phone line. I pay FMCA for this plan.
With the above setup it works like this: When i use my phone for incoming or outgoing calls it uses my phone plan with whatever phone provider I have. When I use my phone to connect to the internet I use the FMCA plan but I have to make sure I'm connected to the hotspot or at home to my wireless router. When you'r phone is not connected to a hotspot or wireless router you pay your phone provider for the used data.
Other things to note is that the price of the FMCA plan is a set price, there is no tax or other fees (There is no $20 per line fee for example). The data you can use is unlimited but may slow down after 25GB is used depending on the tower you are connected to. In contrast, the original unlimited Verizon plan will throttle down after 10GB regardless of congestion, that is a big a difference with the FMCA plan. There is no contract with the FMCA so if you decide to end your plan you can do that any time and the MiFi hotspot is your to keep (a $199 value). In case you end the FMCA plan you can add the MiFi to a Verizon contract but when you like the unlimited data you probably pay more and are subject to throttle after 10GB
Hope this will clear up the complexity a bit and sorry if I have beaten a dead horse but this was to make it easy to understand for everyone.
UPDATE 6/16/2017 from the FMCA Forum:
FMCA recently sent out notifications to a limited group of members as part of a ?soft launch? or ?beta test? of a wireless data plan from Verizon. FMCA had plans to share this information with the entire membership after this test period. Online news outlets heard about the plan and released information before FMCA was ready to make the announcement to all members. Response during this test period has been overwhelming, and we have had to suspend entries to the program. Rest assured that once we are ready to release information about the benefit, all members will be given the opportunity to evaluate the program and enroll if they believe it will meet their needs. Stay tuned for additional information.