Let's talk Cell Phones

I am sorta surprised nobody mentioned the T-Mobile veteran plans. (for those that qualify or have a family member who does) My bill dropped an immediate $40/mo for 3 lines. (its $80 now for 2 lines all unlimited, plus another for $15 with a discount of $5 it works out to 30/line.

I looked into Red Pocket, and used it for a while instead of that third line. But in my case I need one unlimited line anyway for myself. The biggest issue I ran into was how they handle annual accounts – you are essentially going to have an outage when the plan expires and until you have a new code or switch to a “normal” plan.

Its not particularly user friendly between the activation and billing systems either. I had an active phone that was actually working and could not see it in my account to renew it. It was sorta the last straw.

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Congratulations. I’m glad to see that they’ve gotten their act together. My experience with them was much earlier and was so bad that I swore them off for, well so far, eternity.

I think sprint service is highly dependent on where you live. I had an unlimited plan with sprint from the beginning and always had decent coverage, but never quite as good as verizon or att. The only time I considered switching was when my area had 4g for nearly a year from vz and att, but not sprint. I hung in there and they eventually rolled it out. Now the only complaint I have is the random and uncommon dead spot. I could definitely see sprint not being an option if I lived someplace where their network is poor or obsolete, however.

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Ting is one of the most expensive MVNO’s. You can save 2/3 by switching.
Maybe check out https://www.usmobile.com/plans, https://store.tpo.com/plans, SpeedTalk Mobile Wireless Plans - SpeedTalk Mobile Wireless or International Calling with Tello Mobile.

Not sure what MVNO means but Ting isn’t a pay as you go service as the others seem to be. And you can share minutes among phones and not have to buy a separate plan for each phone. When you add taxes and fees I didn’t see anything that would be significantly cheaper on a reliable network.

MVNO = Mobile Virtual Network Operator
In other words, they resell the major carrier’s services. Ting primarily uses the Sprint network.

Used an empty T-Mobile sim card from a previous port-in / port-out to get a new T-Mobile number for $3. Sim card was in a Moto G3. Bought a Galaxy S8 at my local Xfinity store (they were sold out online) and ported the number from T-Mobile to Xfinity Mobile. Phone was $600. They are running a promo with $300 back on all Samsung devices. So after a few months of Xfinity Mobile service (100mb free, 1gb $12/mo), I should get the rebate and will be able to unlock the phone and switch my Sprint sim over and keep my $15/month unlimited plan on this new phone. Can’t beat a new Samsung Galaxy S8 for $300.

I might actually be able to switch my Sprint sim card into the phone now, but for $300, I’m thinking of playing it safe and leaving it until I get the rebate.

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Doesn’t Ting charge like $6 per phone for that privilege?
Other carriers charge $0 per line, 1 cent per text, 2 cents per MB, and 3 cents per minute.
If you are paying $30 per month, $12 of which is just for service fee, there is no way the pricing structure above wouldn’t save you a decent amount of money.

The reliable network you are mentioning is Sprint, which is exactly the same other providers are using.

$6 a line
$3 for 100 minutes
$3 for 100 texts
$3 for 100 MB

That’s $21 a month for two phone plus the taxes. Average bill $30 a month.

FYI, I was on pre-paid T-Mobile for a couple of years. Red Pocket has the same plan via eBay and it cost me around $20.75 a month or $249.00 a year. For the same plan, I was paying, with taxes and BS fees, $49.78 a month or $597.36 a year. That’s a big savings at least for me of around $29.03 a month or $348.36 a year. Pretty sweet. Also, forgot to mention I received an additional 1.5% CB from TopCashBack on the 249 plus another 2% CB from using the Citi DoubleCash credit card (though, since it was classified via Paypal as a cell company, I might had been able to get 5% CB via Amex Simply Cash or via US Bank Cash+ credit card - will try this out next year). I also received another 1% in eBay bucks. So, all in all, a good deal.

A++ for Red Pocket!!!

That sounds rather high for 100min/100sms/100Mb.

Why not go Red Pocket 100min/100sms/500 Mb which is $5/month (or less when on promo) or even with Tello (Sprint MVNO) which has 100 min/unlimited text/200Mb for $8/month.

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Don’t see anything for $5 a month, but really $5 or $10 isn’t much difference and Ting has the only plans that let you share minutes, texts and data.

The Red Pocket plans are cheaper when purchased through ebay… here’s the one I was thinking of although it’s not on any kind of sale currently. On sale it can be found for about $4/month. Other advantage is that you could have one line with Sprint, the other with Verizon to have coverage of two different CDMA networks.

I just figured that at $5/month for each phone line, you would not care about sharing minutes/sms/data since each line would have the 100min/100text/500 MB which is same or more than the Ting plans mentioned. And it’d be $10/month instead of $30. To me that’s a significant difference on top of effectively getting more minutes/texts and especially way more data.

Or for $8.25/month x 2 = $16.50 you could have 500 min/500sms/500Mb on each line. Just seemed better to me.

Ting was the first service I used after 10+ years with Sprint and it seemed like a great deal compared to Sprint. Just checked out Red and they seem to have poor reviews. Red Pocket Mobile Reviews | Read Customer Service Reviews of www.redpocket.com

Red Pocket customer service is not very good. I haven’t had trouble with their service but after porting from Tello where customer service was excellent, it was a concern too (and hence why I mentioned Tello as well in my previous post).

But due to coverage in our area, I did not want to be on the Sprint network any more so we switched our phones to AT&T and Verizon.

Ting was a great deal, comparatively, when they were new, because there were so few competitive MVNOs, and almost none of them let you bring over existing Sprint phones.

Now that services like Republic (and others) have MUCH broader phone offerings, their cheaper service couples really nicely with picking up deeply discounted phones during sale periods. (i.e. picked up a B&H offer about a year ago that was stupendously good)

Per line, Republic will hit you for $15 (unlimited talk + text) and sells you 1Gb data in $5 increments.

With a bunch of lines, and very low use, you might still come out ahead with Ting, but with even moderate use, Republic gets a lot cheaper pretty quickly. (and there are competing services that are comparable, or even cheaper, depending on how you use them and what phones you might already have)

Mintsim is cheaper still than republic. I’ve have very good customer service experience.

Ends up about $16.50 after taxes a month. 2gb high speed, then throttles. Unlimited talk and text.

Their website says you pay a year of service in advance. Hopefully they don’t run off like RingPlus.

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I just keep buying the 3 month plan for $45 (new number each time).

It must be pretty annoying to your contacts 4x a year.

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