Xfinity Mobile, Comcast’s newly-launched and surprisingly good mobile division, has a very simple and very excellent deal: $200 off any flagship phone, provided you’re also signing up for a new line on Xfinity Mobile. The offer applies on the iPhone 7, Galaxy S8, Galaxy Note 8, and any other flagship offered by Xfinity Mobile.
Whether you want to descent into the belly of the most corporate beast is one question, but the phone deal tied to Xfinity Mobile’s cheap plans is a compelling offer.
Xfinity Mobile is an MVNO, meaning it buys up access on one of the wireless carriers and then resells that to its customers. In Comcast’s case, the network it’s using is Verizon, which means you’re hopping on board with the network with the best coverage in the US.
The plans are good, and cheaper than Verizon’s offerings if you’re not opening up four unlimited lines. There are two plans on offer: the $45-per-month Unlimited, which gets you unlimited talk, text, and data, up to a soft cap of 20GB per month; and the per-GB option, which charges $12 per GB per month.
Comcast is letting you mix and match different types of line on one account, which is unusual for a wireless carrier, and can help make a family plan a lot cheaper. Normally, pricing for Unlimited plans works that the cost per line decreases the more lines you have on the account, but you can’t mix and match different types of lines. It’s designed so that you’ll end up paying for unlimited data for you entire family — even your grandparents who still have an AOL email — since it’s cheaper than doing it line by line.
There are catches: Xfinity Mobile is only available to existing Comcast customers, and therefore only available in areas where Comcast offers home cable and internet service. MVNO partnerships also often come with strings attached. Verizon doesn’t reveal the specifics of any MVNO relationships, but oftentimes MVNO customers are deprioritized compared to Verizon’s own customers, which means Xfinity Mobile customers might see slower speeds at peak times.
