Anyone use pre-paid cell phones?

I've had a standard cell phone plan for almost ten years, the plans usually running $40-50 per month, and currently my wife and I each have a cell phone. In an effort to save money, we're considering driopping one of the cell phones and going to a pre-paid cell, unless there are a lot of strings attached and small print that could come back to bite us. I've looked at the Virgin Mobile and Tracphone plans, and the Virgin phones seem like the better deal. We wouldn't use the second phone a lot, so we wouldn't need a lot of pre-paid airtime. I think the minimum to keep the phone going is $20 every three months with Virgin, which compared to the $40+ a month we're paying now seems like a good deal, especially I typically am no-where my plan minutes now.

Anyone use a pre-paid cell phone? Any thoughts or advice on the topic?

-Keith

I am interested in this too as I also carry a phone that is rarely used and I'd like to have an extra one to give to baby sitters and the like when they go out with the kids.

I have a friend who has one and I was unable to reach him lately because he was out of range and it didn't have a way to leave a message for him. So in order to be useful it would have to include some voice mail service too I would think. Do any of these do that?

Virgin Mobile is the best deal going.

You only need to add $20.00 every 90 days to keep your account active. It's $ .25 per minute for the first 10 minutes of each day and $ .10 per minute for the rest of the day. No peak / weekend things to deal with. If you only use it on an emergency basis it would cost you $6.67 per month. As long as your account is active the money does not expire. No roaming of long distance either.

See if your company permits you to pay on a regular basis by credit card. That way, you won't forget to top up before the monthly term ends. If I forget to top up, I lose all my unused minutes I've banked.

Otherwise, make sure you have some automated way to remind yourself a couple of days in advance.

I'm not impressed with Tracfone but haven't used it.

Virgin is an excellent deal if you don't use the phone much. You get unlimited free voice mail if you check the messages from a landline phone. That makes the service a fairly good deal for voice mail alone, even if you just throw the phone itself away and never use it. If you use the cell phone to check messages, they charge you for airtime.

They have one annoying practice: if your call completes, they charge you airtime from the instant you hit the "send" button. So if it takes 10 sec to set up the call, 20 seconds ringing, 15 seconds saying hello and who you are, and 20 seconds on the actual conversation (e.g. setting up a time or place to meet somewhere), that's 65 seconds and they charge you for 2 minutes. That kind of call turns out to be extremely common.

Virgin uses the Sprint PCS network whose coverage is pretty good in bigger cities but not so good in the boonies.

Another good prepaid plan is Verizon Free-up. It has better coverage than Virgin and the per-minute rates can work out lower (esp. on evenings/weekends), and they don't start billing calls til the other person actually answers, but the minimum charge is $30 every 2 months instead of $20 every 3 months (i.e. over twice as high). Which deal is better for you depends on your specific usage.

You can buy used phones for either plan on ebay or craigslist, or sometimes even here on BST non-lights. That can be cheaper than buying the phone new, though watch out for activation fees when you supply your own phone.

Finally, the Kyocera K7 phone sold by Virgin has a built-in LED flashlight, so I guess CPF'ers should always pick that model /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif.

I have a Verizon PP phone. Daytime is $.35 per min, evenings, after 9PM are $.10 per min, as are weekends. It costs $30 every 60 days (not two months)

Coverage, in my opinion, is excellent.

The only gothca is that analog roaming is $1 per min. In my modest travels, that has only happened once. In the mountains of Alaska. Even had coverage from Niagara Falls NY through Canada to Detriot.

Virgin came out after I signed up, so I have no comment on them. However looking at Sprint, Cingular and Verizon, Verizon was the clear choice for me.

--
Jeff

I used to have pre-paid cellular service with Airtouch, Verizon, GTE, and Singular (GTE was bought out by Singular in 2002, and I had to go up there and get a new handset and new service). They were each good in their own ways, but sucked in their own ways too.
The last pre-paid cellular service I had was with Singular. And if you let the card expire (30 days from the date of purchase, I think), they disconnect you.

So, at this time, I do not use pre-paid cellular telephone service.

Verizon's nationwide (Free-up) plan supposedly has no roaming charges anywhere in the US. The phone works in Canada but the charges are enormous. However, you can call from the US to Canada with it at domestic US rates. Yes, $30/60 days is correct, and I think it's $20/90 days for Virgin.

Neither of these plans kills your account until something like 90 days after the card expire, but both say you lose all your banked minutes if that happens (the phone won't work til you add another card). I did let my Virgin card expire when I had a few dollars left on it. I put in another card a few days later and the banked minutes came back. But I can't promise that's repeatable.

I have Virgin, I am a light user and I recommend this as a standout in terms of affordability. The only real gotcha is that you have to buy a phone up front, but the rave is only $60 and comes with $10 or $20 in free airtime to start (depending on where you buy and what deal is in effect at the time) and considering what I am saving on a monthly basis, the phone pays for itsself in a few months. The rave also has GPS location for 911 calls, a 3mm LED flashlight, voice recognition dialing and overall is a decent phone.

Sprint PCS may not be the best network in terms of clarity and maybe even coverage, depending on your location, but I have found it to be completely adequate.

There is no problem buying more minutes right from the cell phone with a registered credit card (there are other methods, too) and the munutes always roll over as long as you do it within 60 days of your expiration date. Yes: you get 90 days active and then 60 days inactive before you lose minutes, and even then you can transfer them to another phone if you want to. I figure my $20 every 90 days gets me roughly 30 minutes per month, and with unlimited rollover, I am accumulating minutes rather than running out. Between that and the discounted rate after 10 minutes in one day, I am never afraid of getting stuck on a long call or ocassionally needing it for heavy use. My wife and I both have VM phones and are both happy. She is a lot gabbier than I am, but she still normally gets about 2 months out of her $20, so it is still the most affordable option for her by a large margin.

We had one problem with one phone and VM replaced it for free, but dealing with the peppy but incompetent customer service people was unbelievably frustrating.

I recommend buying the phone directly from the virginmobileusa.com website. The cost is the same, overnight shipping is free and I think you get the most free minutes this way. Get an aftermarket case rather than the VM ones. That'll run an extra $10-20.

You also get unlimited free incoming paging and text messaging and voice mail and net alerts. Outgoing text messages are 10 cents each. You never have to worry about roaming or long distance because it is always the same rate. International calls are more, of course. Billing is by the whole minute and starts when you press "send" which is standard in the industry. This is a well rounded plan.

For $6.67/month, you can't come close to beating this deal for the light user. If you can control your usage and don't want to be on a cell phone all the time, this can save you a fortune over the years. But if you are using hundreds of minutes per month, this is probably going to be more expensive than a monthly plan. And if you are using thousands of minutes per month, this plan will kill you.

By the way, remember that you can now usually keep your current cell phone number when switching to a new carrier, but you have to follow the correct procedure. Contact your current carrier to find out how.

You guys might also want to look into "Add a line" options, where you spend $40 for the first phone for, say, 400 minutes -- and the add a second line (Phone) for another $10/month. Shares minutes with the first phone but you generally get free calling between the 2 cell phones.

If you use Qwest at home, I think they even have a plan where you get free unlimited minutes to your home phone.

Might look into those and see if they're better for your situation.

I thought of that Saaby, but all of the plans I've looked into required the main cell phone to have a plan of at least $50-60 per month, and then another $10 per line after that. That wouln't save us hardly any money over the $80 per month we're paying for two cell phones now.

Looks like Virgin Mobile is the best deal going now for a pre-paid cell. Unless I find out something really negative in the next few days, we'll probably cancel one of our current phones and switch to Virgin. If all goes well and our minutes of usage per month don't get very high on the remaining cell, we might even cancel the other phone with Cingular and go with two Virgin Mobile phones.

-Keith

Just tell them when you enroll that you want to opt out of all the marketing crap that they try to put you into. In particular make sure to tell them that you don't want the SMS text spam (they send you text messages with, um, exciting offers). I generally prefer to pay cash for the refill cards rather than refilling with my credit card, just because it feels cleaner that way, but I'm unusually paranoid about stuff like that.

I have a tracfone myself. I have had it for like the past 2 years. I had to pay roughly $80 for the phone when I got it and $100 for 2 years (100 a year) for a 1yr's activation and 150 'units'. My monthly cost would be roughly $11.67 after 2 years in March '05.

Airtime stays active for 60 days on a Tracfone. If you let it lapse all you have to do is use another airtime card. That reactivaes the phone but not neccessarily with the same phone #. You also keep the previous airtime minutes. If the phone is inactive for 4 months you loose any minutes that were still on it.

You do incur roaming. Just depends on where they (Tracfone) have agreements. It's 1 'unit' / minute for local and 2 'units' / minute for roaming. Units rounded up to the nearest minute. For example 1min 1sec would be 2 units deducted.

When the renewal time is up in March I may move to something else. The phone is currently a Nokia 5165.

I've had an AT&T prepaid phone, in addition to my regular Verizon cell phone for several years. Before retirement, the prepaid phone was the one I'd carry to work, just in case I absolutely needed to use one between work and home. That way if I lost it, or it got stolen, I was only out whatever was prepaid. After retiring I kept it, since I found the voice mail feature of benefit.

In order to keep it active, I have to buy $10.00 worth of time for it every 90 days. That brings my cost down to about $3.33 a month. Even though I'm not really interested in using the phone for talking, I can check it to see if I've got any voice mails, and then call the voice mail on my home phone to get the messages. Most business arrangements in which I figure I'll be getting nuisance calls receive my prepaid phone number instead of my regular phone number. Since I keep the phone off, I never hear it ring, yet my callers have a means of leaving a messge.

I guess that's just a bunch of words to say I've got a voice mail number for only $3.33 a month, that doesn't interfere with my home phone or regular cell phone.

I've got ATT's GoPhone. ATT sucks but the plan is ok. $35 with taxes per 30 days, 150 anytime minutes, free weekends and nights, no roaming. Unless I use it a bunch (for me anyway) during the week, it is great. There has been one or two occassions where I had to pay when I'd rather not have had to fool with it then, but overall its ok.

The plan is fine with me, but ATT sucks. I'd try to find a similar plan from a better company.

$10 every 90 days? I didn't know there were any plans that cheap. Got more details? I'd like to find one of those.

paulr:

Here is the link for the AT&T prepaid ($10 - 90 days)
http://www.attwireless.com/personal/free2go/index.jhtml

Glenn

I got The AT&T for my Wife to carry for emergency use.
She does not use it so the balance has rolled over multiple times so that there is now over $250.00 prepaid on it. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Glenn

Wow, thanks, that's good to know about. I even have an old Star Tac (DAMPS/AMPS) that should work with that service. Coverage must not be so good any more, but I think it would work around here. I wonder what the activation fee would be.

[ QUOTE ]
paulr said:
$10 every 90 days? I didn't know there were any plans that cheap. Got more details? I'd like to find one of those.

[/ QUOTE ]
The US situation seems to be very different from over here. Our three main Telecom Operators (Base, Mobistar & Proximus) offer prepay cards which you only have to charge up once every year for about €5. Isn't there anything comparable available in the US?