The headline indicates, that I'm going to tell you how to save money on your cell phone bill.  I'm going to do that, but I have to tell you about some changes I had to make to get there.  First I have to explain the situation I found myself in, that allowed me to save money on my cell phone bill.  I run an Internet business.  I do a lot of things on the Internet  I work a lot of hours every day and I have a lot of Internet projects going on all the time.  I work in my in home office with five computers and I keep them busy most all day long.  I work well into the night many days.  So my Internet connection has to be rock solid.  My main  Internet connection is through Comcast.  I chose them because they have a very fast connection and for an additional ten dollars I was able to bump speed up even more.  Speed is important to me because time is money and I don't want to waste any of it.  As good as Comcast has been, at times, the network goes down sometimes.  Most of my outage problems, with Comcast, occur late at night and that's some of my most productive time of the of the day.  So to keep my blood pressure under control and get a lot of work done I have to have a backup Internet provider.  

My backup Internet provider used to be with AT&T and it was a DSL connection.  It was relatively slow because I did not want spend a lot of money for just a backup.  Recently I discovered another Internet company called Clear Network and after investigating it I decide to go with Clear instead of AT&T.  I was paying $40 a month for the AT&T DSL service.   So, I moved to Clear, which cost me $60 per month.  At this point it sounds like I'm not saving any money but spending more money.  I also needed an Internet connection for my laptop when I leave my office.  With Clear I was able to get a modem that works in my home plus a mobile hotspot, in the same deal, to use when I'm away from home.  When I changed to Clear as my Internet provider I also received a bump up in speed of nearly 5 times over the old DSL connection. 

Next, I took a look at my six year old routers and the wired connections in my office.  My old routers were wired only routers which worked OK in my office but I wanted some wireless connections.  So, I bought a couple of new Netgear wireless routers from Amazon and at the same time I replaced my cables with new higher speed Cat 6 cables.  Now I have routers that are capable of producing either wired or wireless connections.  After a bit of experimenting I soon found the wired connections were going to give me the fastest connections possible.  Now, it is not unusual for me get Comcast wired connections of 35 M/bs and better, so I use them on my main work computers.  The wireless connections from the same routers are given me about 10 or 15 M/bs.  As a result of changes I now have much faster Internet connections in addition to having the mobile hotspot for $20 a month more than I was spending on the DSL service.

The next thing I did was to take a look at my cell phone.  My cell phone is a Samsung Vibrant with T-Mobile.  I did have an unlimited Internet package on that phone that was costing me $30 per month.  I now have started using Wi-Fi on the cell phone, while in my office and the mobile hot spot while away.  So, I dropped the unlimited T-Mobile connection and use the much faster Wi-Fi services.  The mobile hotspot allows me to hook up several devices at the same time, and that's good because I am planning on buying a Wi-Fi only I Pad or Android Tablet sometime this year.  In addition to that I've started using Wi-Fi only on my Kindle reader and again I'm getting the benefit of faster downloads and that makes me happy.  So take a look at where your spending your money and you can probably save some cash.

If you don't have a mobile hotspot you still should look at using all the Wi-Fi you possibly can.  Turn Wi-Fi on when you're in your home and set up any other Wi-Fi connections you might encounter during your day.  Android 2.2 will automatically pick up the Wi-Fi connection that is strongest wherever you go, if you have selected Wi-Fi from the settings menu.  Then if you run out of the Wi-Fi connections completely it will then switch to your cell phone carrier Internet connection.  To set up Wi-Fi on your phone all you need to do is click on Settings, then Wireless Network, and then Wi-Fi settings.  Once  you have the Wi-Fi settings open make sure that Wi-Fi is checked and network notification is checked.

Next you should install another app on your phone to check the speed of your Internet connection.  I use an app from speedtest.net and it works just fine.  So, what you do is you open this up and you run a test of your cell phones connection Internet connection and see how fast its operating.  Then turn Wi-Fi on and run another test to see what how fast your Wi-Fi connection is.  I think that if you do this you'll sfind that the your Wi-Fi connections are going to be running something like three or four times faster than your cell phones Internet connection through your cell phone carrier.

So just remember to turn Wi-Fi on all the time and leave it that way, if you're using android 2.2.  I also suggested to turn GPS on all time.  The GPS will automatically shut off when you're not using an application that requires GPS.  After you've done all this keep track of how much bandwidth you're using for a month when leaving Wi-Fi turned on as much is possible.  Then check with your cell phone carrier and see if you can reduce your data plan and save some money.