|
Below, you'll find extensive information on leading
cheap cellular phone articles and products to help you on your way
to success.
Choose Cheap Cell Phones and Cheap Cellular Service With Care
By Jon Arnold
You are shopping for a new or looking to change your existing cellular service to see if you can get a more cost effective plan or better customer service, and with any luck at all, both of those. If you change cellular carriers, it almost goes without saying that you will need to get a new cell phone, since it is difficult (and perhaps even not possible) to use the same with a different carrier.
So you start shopping, perhaps at your local retail outlets, those places in the center of the mall, and also online. One of the things that you find is that this plan with this carrier and that plan with that carrier include a free with the plan, assuming of course you are willing to sign a one year or perhaps even a two year agreement. You need to be aware of a couple of things right now, since this is very likely the kind of information you are finding, regardless of where you are shopping.
1. Those one year or two year agreements are in concrete, and typically it takes something roughly equivalent to an act of God to get them terminated early without being required to pay a hefty early termination fee. Based on that, you may want to consider a carrier that will let you TRY the service for two weeks or 30 days to see if their cellular service is as good as they would like you to believe. Sprint has this type of agreement, as does Cingular, and if their service does not cut the mustard, you have two weeks or 30 days to make that determination, and can return the phone and cancel the plan without obligation (outside of that first month of service) as long as you do it without their timeframe.
2. Be aware of the "free cell phone" that you are getting with this plan, because it is almost certainly the bottom of the heap phone in terms of quality, performance, battery life, signal reception, and every other aspect. The "free" part sounds nice, but you need to look beyond that to find out if it is really free, and in most cases, it is not free because very few people can actually make regular use of such a limited cell phone.
Ok, so now let's say that you have found a you can live with, now comes the part about finding the cheapest cellular plan. You need to know what your anticipated usage is going to be so that you can select the right plan. Do you make most of your cellular calls at night or on weekends? If so, make sure your plan has unlimited nights and weekends. What time of night do you call? "Night" usually starts at 9pm in the time zone you are calling from, but for an extra $5 a month, Sprint will have "night" start at 7pm instead. Based on the calls you make, is that worth it for the calls you want to make?
How many friends do you have? T-Mobile has a plan where you
identify five friends, and those five friends can be anywhere in the continental US, and can be a home phone, a business phone, or even a on another carrier's network. You can have unlimited calling with those five friends, 7 days a week. Do you have more than five friends that you call often? If so, this plan may not work for you, but this is yet another option available to you.
In your cellular service to date, have you needed to use the carrier's customer service line very often? If customer service is important to you, then you will want to steer clear of Verizon, since there are thousands of complaints from customers dating back more than 10 years that indicate that their customer service would have to IMPROVE to be rated as good as "extremely poor".
For the most part, a cheap with a cheap cellular service plan is going to cost you as much as the next higher phone or plan, after you figure in the cost of aspirin and antacid you will need to purchase to deal with the hassles that the bottom of the barrel represents. Know your calling habits and choose a plan that is not bottom of the barrel, which will ultimately be your best option.
|
