Our choices for high speed Internet here are satellite or cellular. A couple of years ago we switched entirely to Verizon for our data when they had a promotion of half price on their larger data plans. We ended up with 40 GB for $150/month (just for the data part) or $3.75 per GB.

We don't have any TV so if we want to watch news clips or any other video type entertainment (other than rented DVD's) it comes through our data and we regularly bump against our limit.

I make a point of updating all apps and operating systems on devices at the beginning of the month and then we decide how to use data from then on for the rest of the month. Today was a rollover day and I used 7.5 of our 40 GB just updating apps and operating systems (most of it was updating a Windows 10 partition on my laptop that I haven't used in nearly a year).

While updating the apps on my phone I noticed the Verizon app now has something caused PopData. If you know you're going to need to use a lot of data in a short period of time, you can request a 30 minute or a 1 hour PopData session through the app. Verizon will look at network traffic and if there is enough excess bandwidth available to allow it, they'll allow you unlimited data for the time period you select.

The PopData session only applies for one device but you can using tethering on that device while it's happening.

A one hour session costs $3 and a half hour session costs $2. I decided to try it. I reset the statistics on cellular data on my iPhone and ended up doing two PopData sessions before it was all said and done. I downloaded some videos for the kids and my wife and I to watch for later through Amazon Prime with the Amazon Video app, the newest version of SMS Advanced, Quickbooks Pro 2017, LibreOffice, Paint.NET, finished updating all of the other devices, etc etc.

By the end I had gone through about 10.3 GB according to the cellular data statistics on my phone for $6 or a cost of about $0.58/GB which is far cheaper than the $3.75/GB we're running when we're using the normal part of our plan. I guess I'm a fan. I'm guessing I'll likely create a shared list with my wife of things we need to download and then when we start a new month or when we get enough things we need to download built up we'll just plow through some data in an hour or two.