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Post your comments for Prepaid Plans Heat Up: Why No-Contract Wireless Is on the Rise here

[thewazak]

Oooh! Looks like my pre-paid MotoRazr is becoming trendy again.....
Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but being self employed and traveling anywhere at any time, a basic GSM and a few sims is all I need for low cost voice comms world wide. (You can keep your texts and mobile data. That's a "luxury" I can manage well without!)
But I agree that if pre-pay becomes "premium", then it will be nice not to be looked at like a second class citizen because I don't have the latest all singing, all dancing contract idiotphone with more useless gizmo's than Gizmodo!

[Kamen]

My girlfriend just signed-up for Open Range 4G wireless broadband home service. I was amazed they offered this in her area. It has no contract and cancellation fee. It only costs $38.95 per month and the modem/wifi router is portable within Open Ranges coverage area, you just have to plug it in for power somewhere. I'm sure it will be going to grandma's for the holidays to make the time pass a little faster.

[StanTlr]

Been using a plain old Tracfone for years! It is the best value for money IMHO if you want a cell phone.
Now if you want a portable computer in your pocket then it's obviously not your best choice. Then again, I very often chuckle at how bad these smartphones are at simply making or receiving calls...
I'm glad to hear my Tracfone will be mainstream again soon. Then my friends with fancy phones won't have to borrow my cell so much! ;-)

[CookieGarris]

Prepaid plans are great! I thought people were exaggerating when they would tell me about the monthly discrepancies in their bills then my eyes were opened when my monthly bill that me and my sister shared went from around 100 dollars to over 600 dollars in ONE month! We had never used our roll over minutes and never missed a payment. I asked them to review the bill and expressed to them that if worse comes to worse to protect my credit rating which was excellent at the time I would pay. I asked for two weeks to look over my call history and asked if they would double check their records. I didn't think this was to much to ask since I had payed my bills in a timely manner for the last 5 years. Needless to say within one week I was receiving rather threatening calls from a collection agency and some of their staff referred to me as trash and lowlife.
I'm righting this mainly to inquire am I the only person this has happened to. I would have paid this bill if given the chance to see why there was that much of a change in just one month. I would just like to know if there are other stories like mine.

[SaleemShaik]

US should learn from India how fast the telecom industry has penetrated rapidly and groomed in the last 5 Years and to become 2nd largest in the world.
http://feedproxy.goo...~3/8oB5L4XBH6M/

India is adopting to the latest and emerging technologies in the telecom field and the providers are offering these services at a very competitative cheap prices to get an edge over others.

In India there is no concept of charging for the incoming calls and the call charges are 0.0002 US dollars per second. No provider in U.S is daring to provide free incoming calls and this should happen to make prepaid plans to bloom.

[Boomer64]

More seniors on retirement incomes are switching to prepaid too. Before I decided on the Tracfone Senior Value phone I did a bit of research and found out Jitterbug isn't the only senior-friendly phone out there. Several of the big providers offer phones designed for seniors. I chose Tracfone because I found a phone I really liked and Tracfone has the cheapest service by far. It goes as low as under $7 a month and includes international long distance for the same price as a local call. Plus there are no roaming charges. The phone I got is a Samsung T155 speaker phone with big keys and an easy to read number display. It's right up there with the best of the senor phones. I think with more senior-friendly phones coming out on the market, there will be a lot more seniors switching to prepaid.

[markacharron]

I will never sign a contract for a phone ,my wife and kid each have a 8330 blackberry unlimited talk , text and web.They have all the apps. a two year contract phones have twitter , facebook , myspace ,google , yahoo ext. 50 bucks a month for each phone( boostmoble). I don't need all that i have att go phone i dont use my cellphone much i pay 25 bucks about every 2 months. WAKE UP AMERICA 2 YEAR CONTRACTS ARE OVER!

[EvologyNow]

The Wi-Fi connection in the Rover Puck will actually support up to 8 devices!

[Toulinwoek]

Well, some might be 'heating up', but I've been pretty warm for a good while now. I haven't had a contract phone since about 2001. Since my mobile is not my primary phone, and I more or less only use it when I need to, so far this year I have spent $25 on mobile service and I still think I have about $3 of that left!
I think a lot of folks' problem is that they simply overuse their phones when it makes no sense to do so, or use the phone for something they should be using a stationary computer to do!
I realize some busy people in some industries would necessarily need to run up some serious voice and data minutes, but NO ONE is going to convince me that most adults, or ANY teenager, has any reason to be racking up $90 or $100 a month in phone charges!

[jdelaro19]

When are these prepaid services going to let us use whatever phone we want that we may already have or can buy used elsewhere. As far as I know T-mobile is the only company that just sells a SIM card that I can put in my smart phone. If I could use any smart phone I wanted with Verizon I might consider using them or any other CDMA provider but you have to buy their phone and there's no way to switch phones like you can with a GSM phone. I see more and more prepaid services now which is great, but I have been using a GSM smartphone for years. There's no reason for not letting people to use their phone of choice, if we are prepaying for voice, data, and txt then why do the providers care what phone we use?

I use a Motorola Razr phone that was originally a Sprint phone, I changed the firmware/software on it to Verizon, then Alltel and now use it with PagePlus so it's not like it can't be done, just sell phones that are easy to change the firmware and not tied to any one company, it's not that hard.

[TheTess]

markacharron, on 22 September 2010 - 08:09 AM, said:

I will never sign a contract for a phone ,my wife and kid each have a 8330 blackberry unlimited talk , text and web.They have all the apps. a two year contract phones have twitter , facebook , myspace ,google , yahoo ext. 50 bucks a month for each phone( boostmoble). I don't need all that i have att go phone i dont use my cellphone much i pay 25 bucks about every 2 months. WAKE UP AMERICA 2 YEAR CONTRACTS ARE OVER!

I will never sign one again either...
I have a really nice & new LG phone through Net 10. Phone was on sale for #20 and it came with 300 mins,
then $30 every 2 months and my unused minutes roll over. Not to mention nickel text messages and 10 cent calls.
Some of us dont have to keep a phone glued to our ear. If I want online, I have a new laptop for that

[PaulKaps2009]

EvologyNow, on 22 September 2010 - 10:31 AM, said:

The Wi-Fi connection in the Rover Puck will actually support up to 8 devices!

Thanks Evology. My mistake (in the original version I said it only supported 5), the fine editors at PC World have fixed the post.

[TerrySmithwiy1]

Prepaid is definitely the way to go. The companies are even gobbling each other up. Virgin Mobile was a great company before Sprint bought it, now I can't recommend it to any of my customers. Text messages are having a worse time than Boost. Even their Broadband2go is worthless in Indy. The download speeds are pure fiction. Measuring by other means, shows bouncing download speeds of a high of about 24k to nothing at all. They make the old AOL dial up look like a good deal. VM use to be so-o-o good. What a shame.

[free2speak]

Tracfone has been a good value for me.

[CollegeGirl90]

OBSESSED with my new prepaid phone with Tracfone. My parents got it for me as a "back to school" gift seeing as I pay for my own cell phone bills. Well with my new Tracfone phone, it basically means NO MORE monthly cell bills. I have a really great quality brand name phone and am saving so much each month. Being a fulltime student, this saving makes a huge difference

[NarcissaGomez]

I started back to school after a two year break last month and I made sure that I invested in a reliable prepaid company. I did my research and decided on Tracfone based on word of mouth and I've been pretty happy so far. The coverage has been better than I expected and the price is really what I needed - I couldn't afford to spend over $100 anymore and now I don't have to.

[OhJoy]

Clearwire/Rover is overselling its WiMax services. It recently imposed an 8GB monthly cap on its users. Once users hits that limit, they are throttled to 25kbps for the rest of the month.

[Clemerboy]

I think it's wonderful how more of the big companies are coming to the party. As it currently stands there isn't really any competitor other than tracfone that serves my needs (which pretty much one item big)- the best coverage nationwide. That simple.
With all the biggy carriers starting to take note, that not only has the market caught onto the fact that their two year contracts, along with their ETFs (which is rather greedy considering this country is trying to rid itself of recession)are expensive, and sometimes downright unreasonable. But ironically you can get better coverage using a cheaper service!
So yeah, them waking up might mean there will be a more competative market, and I might get an even cheaper deal...without having to pay no ETF

[Penroy]

Isn't it wonderful how so many different people can have different "ideal" plans. It seems the more people are accepting prepaid as a viable option, the more varied plans are becoming, to tailor to these needs. Personally, I found something that has a good balance between service, coverage and value for money with the added bonus of complete flexibility. Net10's unlimited plan offers all the above and what makes it stand out to me, is that I can switch between 3 different plans, depending on my circumstances that month. I can get unlimited everything for $50, 750minutes for $25(3c/minute) or if it's a bad month, only pay $15 for 200 minutes. Now there's a company happy to tailor to my needs!