I’ve written before about MVNOs, the cell phone providers who lease airtime from Cingular, Verizon, and Sprint. I decided that my Sprint PCS Vision plan was way too expensive. I don’t use the Internet option much at all now that I’ve got a Boingo account and the 2,000 minutes per month is far more than I ever come close to using. Thus it was time to do some shopping.
After visiting some online forums, I discovered Net10 (and have written about it before), an MVNO which has one of the most affordable plans around. The cost for calls is 10 cents per minute, period. No contracts, monthly fees or daily minimums, just a dime a minute. As opposed to other services, Net10’s minutes can be bought in quantites which last all year. I can buy a card from them providing 1500 minutes and keep them fora whole year. Thus, my monthly cellphone bill can be as low as $12.50 if that’s all the minutes I need a year. Instead, my usage is about 300 minutes per month, which equals (duh) $30 per month. That’s less than half of what I’m currently paying for Sprint!
The phones aren’t flashy, which to me is a good thing since I don’t care to have to lug around a PDA/camera phone/rocket launcher when I need to talk. The battery life should be pretty lengthy without those add-ons, too. The underlying cell phone service is provided by Cingular and T-Mobile, so the coverage is good.
I bought a reconditioned Motorola V171 from Net10 to try them out. Cost was $40. This flip phone has a color screen and is fairly easy to use. The remaining minutes are displayed on the screen so I know what I have as well as when they expire. It has support for polyphonic ringtones, in case I ever go insane and want them for some reason.
My biggest beef with the phone is that the volume on calls is a bit weak. I had trouble hearing Kelly when I took a call from her while I was driving. I thought this was a fatal flaw so I called their support number to return the phone. A nice woman in Belize answered the call and took down all my information. Even though I told her I wanted to switch to a Nokia phone, Net10 sent me an identical V171 in return! I was going to send both of them back when I decided to give the new phone a spin. It turns out the volume wasn’t turned up to the highest level, which makes a difference. Also, I reasoned, if I’m talking while driving I should be using a headset, anyway. I bought a headset and now everything seems fine.
My other beef with the V171 is that the phone just doesn’t seem to fit my ear. Motorola designed the earpiece to be totally flat, which doesn’t match any human ear I’ve ever seen. Thus you can press it against your ear and never get a good seal around it, nor feel comfortable talking on it. Once again, the headset saves the day.
To summarize, I’m happy so far with the Net10 service. I’m marginally happy with the phone. Given what I’ve spent on the phone so far, I don’t have much room to complain. Oh, by the way, the phones come with free airtime, so my $40 bought not only a phone but 300 free minutes, too.
I’m porting my Sprint number to my new Net10 service now. I won’t miss Sprint’s fat phone bill nor its now-redundant Vision internet service. Net10 may be as close to a perfect cell phone service as I’ve seen yet.