Phone & Internet Plans by the Numbers: Data Use, Plan Choice, Contract vs Device-Free Costs, Family Plans, Home Speed Needs & Switching

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Read twelve months of Lena's fictional phone bills, work out her average and peak data use, her busiest calling month and how often she went over her current data allowance.
• Price every fictional plan in Lena's busiest month including extra data, find the cheapest plan that covers both her peak data and her peak minutes with MINIFS and INDEX/MATCH, and see how much the current plan cost her in that month.
• Compare a 24-month contract that includes a phone with buying the same phone outright and taking a cheaper plan without a device, find the price really paid for the phone inside the contract and the month from which buying outright is ahead.
• Turn three fictional promotional offers into their total cost over the contract, find the real average price per month, the offer that is cheapest over the whole contract and how small the real discount of a "50 % off" deal is.
• Check whether a fictional shared family plan beats four single plans and split its price three ways – equally per line, by data used and as a hybrid of both – so that every member can see what is fair.
• Add up what the household does at its busiest hour, add headroom, pick the smallest fictional speed tier that covers it with MINIFS and look up its price with XLOOKUP.
• Compare a fictional internet, TV and landline bundle with buying only the services Birch Row really uses, calculate the cost per service used and see what an unused landline does to the headline saving.
• Add up the one-off cost of switching to a cheaper fictional provider, find the month in which the monthly savings have paid it back, build the net saving over two years and show it in a line chart.