Streaming services for the classroom

What do you think about saving tax-payer dollars by bringing streaming services to the classroom? Cord cutting has been skyrocketing in popularity as recent studies have found cord cutting can save the consumer over $1,000 a year. Now, what about schools? Can they too benefit from cord cutting? As budgets become tight, many schools are considering cutting their TV bills. However, they are still looking for ways to bring video into the classroom as a teaching tool.

The problem is most streaming services don’t include legal rights to stream their content into a classroom. Technically, showing Netflix or Sling TV in a classroom breaks the terms of service as it does not include an additional fee for a public display license. Streaming Netflix or Sling TV content into classrooms will raise the risk of future legal action.

You’ll be glad to learn that there are several streaming services, both free and subscription-based, that can help make learning more fun. Let’s look at a few of our favorite options built especially with classroom learning in mind.

Over the past week, we had a small system failure that knocked a few thousand Ting devices temporarily offline. Some of you reading this might have experienced that failure directly. Many others will have experienced unusual hold times trying to get to our support team as we were dealing with that inflated, failure-related call volume. I wanted to take the opportunity here to explain and apologize to all of you.

Our GSM network provider was performing a planned migration to a new backend system that Ting and other “wholesale partners” like us use to provision and manage our customers on the network.

(As a complete aside, referring to our GSM network provider reminds me how much I loved how everyone would cringe every time Harry said Voldemort. And he was all, “Yeah, I said Voldemort. Please, I’ve defeated him like five books in a row now, I’ll say his name if I want to.” Sorry, anyway…)

This was a change that was not even intended to affect us at all. It was certainly not intended to affect any of our customers. As it was explained to us, devices would seamlessly find their way from the old system to the new system without any outage or inconvenience.

We tested the migration on dummy accounts and experienced no problem. Then we started to cautiously migrate small batches of real customers on Wednesday, July 25 and everything was going smoothly. When we scaled it out further on Thursday and Friday, we started encountering the failures.

Most phones were able to reconnect to the network when restarted. But customers understandably had no way of knowing that and reached out for support. Meanwhile, some IoT (Internet of Things) devices that could not easily be accessed and restarted were more difficult to address.

Between guiding customers through those restarts and managing some fixes with our network provider remotely, it seems that we have gotten through the outages now. Devices seem to be working properly and our support team is answering calls at the speeds you have come to expect.

But we are truly sorry that we did not do a better job identifying these issues and addressing them before they ever affected any of you. You trust us to protect you from exactly these sorts of technical failures and to be accessible to you any time you need us. We take that trust seriously and we will be smarter, more diligent and more cautious in the future.

Thank you for your patience.

Become a Ting ambassador

Have you had lots of success with our refer a friend program? Love Ting? Have you saved a ton of money since making the switch to smarter mobile?

You can become a Ting ambassador at work and spread the word about smarter mobile. Sign up to be considered for an awesome affiliate program. If we’re a good fit, we’ll send you a kit with posters, postcards and swag to help you promote Ting.

You’ll get credit for every person you send to Ting who signs up.

Reduce mobile data usage and save this summer

In the summer, when we’re out and about using our phones more than ever, it’s not hard to rack up a few accidental megabytes every now and then. But over the summer months, with all those trips to the beach, park and picnics, those one-off downloads can start to add up.

We could all use a refresher every now and then when it comes to making the most out of Wi-Fi and curtailing mobile data usage. Use these summer data saving tips so you can enjoy your phone all year long without ever getting a surprise bill.

Don’t forget, Ting lets you set caps and alerts on all your usage. Track your data and set limits on how much you use.

The definition of frugal: why living on the cheap is so great

What does it mean to be frugal? Frugal living is all about being more careful with your money, learning to be more resourceful and creative and realizing the things that you believe are truly important.

Rather than being miserly like Ebenezer Scrooge, people who commit to frugal simple living know how to spend their money wisely in order to become happier and get the most bang for their buck.

You’re going to love this Android data manager

Datally is an Android data manager app by Google that helps users control their mobile data use.

Why would you want to control mobile data? Well, data can be an unnecessary expense on many phone plans, especially when many of us spend most of our time at home or at work where a Wi-Fi connection is readily available.

We’ll walk you through Datally and how it works, plus we’ll review some other helpful hacks for Android users looking to use less (and pay less) on Ting.