I have had a cell phone since 1990 and I think I have used just about every cellular service in the area.
I started with Cellular-One, who were later bought out by AT&T Wireless. I kept them for about 12 years but they were never offering anything better for their existing customers.
I nedt tried Alltel and they were terrible. They constantly dropped calls and have the time you could not get a signal. One minute you had a good signal and the next minute you had none and you had not moved from the chair. My wife ended up changing out 3 phones because of the dropped calls, even though the phones were not the problem.
I then tried Nextel. They had good service, but it was a bit pricey and I found a lot of dead areas around hear and while traveling that were annoying.
Next I tried Cingular with their Roll-over minutes. There service was very good, but they have a lot of those state or federal approved Fees that they add onto your bill. I found I was not using all the minutes and at the end of one year I had nearly 3000 minutes accumulated that my wife and I would never use, and they would start dropping off our account. I did some calculation and found that if I used every minute in my plan, the cost be about 21.4 cents per minute. Not bad, but when you added up the actual minutes were actually using, it works out that we were paying about 74 cents per minute....That's not good.
I have since settle on using a Pay-As-You-Go phone by TracFone. The phones are only $20. With the TracFone, a year off service and as many minutes as we used on our Cingular plan, we have cut our cell phone charges down to about a 3rd of what they were. The service is good since they use both Cingular's and Verizon's networks which is probably the two largest networks in the country.
The phones aren't fancy, but they have all the basic functions I need. TracFone's customer service is not that great. The outsource their call center to India or Pakistan but if you have no problems, you only have to deal with them to activate your phones, and perhaps purchase minutes.
We have had our TracFones for just over a month and so far they are working great, and we like the phones (Nokia 1100's) real well.
...Rich
