My husband is out of contract with AT&T, I still have a year left. We’re considering moving to a low cost month to month carrier but I’m worried about hidden fees or complications?
I was looking around and it looks like Total Wireless is a great way to go for us, for $60 a month we can get 8GB of shared data with unlimited talk and text. I’m not sure if this includes taxes and fees; Cricket’s pricing does include them but is nowhere near that cheap for the two of us. (Although anything is relatively cheaper than what we’re paying now, which is $160something a month.)
Soooo… what’s the catch? Seriously, I get that these month to month “companies” (I believe Total Wireless is really Verizon and I know Cricket is really AT&T) are hoping that budget conscious people find them, and that less budget conscious people will stick with their “known” companies, but… really? I can just take my AT&T phone, take the breaking the contract hit, and get my number ported somewhere else to get more data for sixty dollars a month for two people? I mean, there’s a catch, right?
Probably not. Most budget carriers buy bandwidth at a reduced rate from the major carriers like AT&T and Verizon, so you’ll still be on the same networks, but not pay their exorbitant rates. I get 10 Gb of 4G data for $55 a month from Straight Talk and get solid coverage on AT&T’s LTE network. The only catch is if you use all your 4G data, you get throttled to a slower speed until you refill your plan for the next 30 day cycle.
Edit - Total Wireless runs on Verizon’s towers, so you should check how good their coverage is in your area before you switch.
In town everybody’s fine. (Is that not the case everywhere?) It’s when you go visit the inlaws in East Buttfuck that it gets iffy, and there Verizon does better than AT&T.
So, backing up - I’m to understand that seriously there’s no catch? That if coverage is fine (and on Cricket and Total it is because they’re owned by the big local players) there’s… No hidden cost, no gotcha?
No gotcha. What you pay for is what you get. No contract. No cancellation penalty. No bills, you generally pay every 30 days to renew your service. No activation fee in most cases. You can keep your number and even keep your own phone if it’s compatible with the network. An AT&T phone likely won’t be compatible on a network using Verizon, though. AT&T phones are GSM and Verizon is CDMA, so you may need to get a new phone.
And, while Cricket is owned by AT&T, Total Wireless is owned by America Movil, owners of Straight Talk, Net 10, and TracFone, and their sales are handled through Wal-Mart.
Fee-wise the pricing is more straight forward for the prepaid carriers than the contract carriers.
Service-wise: 1. You usually don’t get roaming on the cheap carriers 2. You are less likely to be able to use your phone as a hotspot (particularly for Verizon). 3. Download speed may be limited. I think Verizon has a 5Mbs limit.
As was mentioned, name brand carrier service generally includes roaming, for example, Tmobile phones with Tmobile brand service will automatically switch to an AT&T signal if there’s no Tmobile signal available. Also, depending on the phone/carrier/plan, you may not get access to all the frequencies and bandwidth available with name brand service and/or during times of network congestion, guess which customers’ connections are prioritized. IOW, you can expect a lower level of reception, call quality and data speeds. If the discount is worth more than the trade-offs to you, then it’s a good deal, like any other discount stuff. But just because a discount phone plan uses a name brand carrier signal doesn’t mean it’s all the same frequencies and bandwidth available with the name brand service.
PS: There are also sometimes advanced calling services that won’t work with a discount/prepaid/MVNO plan, such as call forwarding and visual voicemail.
I don’t think it raises to the “gotcha” level, but in the case of network congestion (too many people downloading all at once from the same tower, for example) you will be deprioritized first.
Everyone will pretty much take some sort of performance hit in that situation, but yours would be more noticeable.
Not on 4G. I’m with Straight Talk and just did a speed test. I got 30 Mbs download. And it’s been even faster than that on several occasions. That’s on AT&T. Verizon should have similarly fast speeds.
You might check out Ting. They are similar to the others in that they use other companies frequencies. They have a calculation process on their site in which you enter your current usage and they will tell you what you would pay Ting.
In each of the options mentioned above, you’ll have to check with the individual companies about whether your current phone is compatible. I think, in most cases, a GSM phone with be compatible where a CDMA phone might not be.
Our Sprint contract is about up and we’d like to move to a low-cost, monthly plan. One nice thing about Sprint has been their free international roaming plan (we travel internationally a couple times a year - mainly my wife for work but we take one leisure trip every year). It looks like Google Fi has this in 135 countries. Do the other monthly plans have international options?
The catch is that if you and I are near to each other, and things get congested, I’ll have a better signal, better call quality, etc… since I’m an AT&T subscriber, and will be prioritized above you, since you’re on Straight Talk.
The discount services are basically reselling the larger carriers’ access, with the caveat that they’re going to be lower priority when and if things get tight.
If things aren’t congested, you may never notice, but if things do get tight, you probably will notice.
Also… the discount tiers may have lesser options- do you have HD Voice calling, visual voice mail or WiFi Calling? All come with no extra charge as an AT&T subscriber.
I’ve been with Boost for about three years. I pay $30 a month for unlimited text, data, and talk. I left AT&T because they wanted a $500 deposit for six months for smart phone service. I got my first Boost smartphone and service through QVC or HSN (don’t remember which) with no deposit and I paid off the phone over three months with no extra charges.
I don’t care about HD voice calling, the calls sound fine on my phone as is. I don’t need WiFi calling, I’ve never been out of the US or make calls to numbers out of the US. I thought visual voice mail was only on iPhones on AT&T. I have an Android and am perfectly capable of dialing into my voicemail number to listen to my messages. And when I did have an iPhone on AT&T, I didn’t miss the visual voicemail when I lost it. I don’t find that I need any of those things, so I don’t care whether or not I have them, free or not.
We have Virgin Mobile. Each phone is $30 per month with 3G data, $35 for 4G, with unlimited talk/text. They are on the sprint network and we have had no issues in 3 years with them. No hidden charges or fees.
We had to get new phones but I got one that works fine for my middle-age needs for under $100.
I don’t know if we could add international roaming but they have a $5 international outgoing call package.