GregHowley.com

My wife and I have been looking to change cell phone plans for the past few months. We've been with Nextel for a year now, and our phone bills are way too high - $150 and higher on some months. So while I was doing my shopping around, I figured I'd post my findings so that other people might have a lookat what I'd found.

Nextel has the walkie-talkie thing going, but the novelty of that wears off fairly quickly. It seems more than anything else a gimmick to get customers. When you actually use it regularly, the one-way nature of "DirectConnect" conversations becomes very annoying. Nextel also has "free-incoming" plans, but nobody calls my cell phone, so I have no desire to consider that.

Linda had AT&T recently, and had trouble with the signal often. AT&T also has roaming charges, which nailed her with extra fees and forever embittered her to phone plans with any extra roaming fees. I hear that AT&T has improved their network, but other random tidbits I've heard about them lead me to leave them out of my considerations. Same thing with Sprint - I hear they have good phones, but bad service.

So my options were down to T-Mobile, Verizon, Cingular, and Nextel. T-Mobile looks to have some inexpensive plans, and the family plan looks especially good. Verizon is known to have great coverage, and Cingular has rollover minutes - another plus.

Linda and I figure that we use 600-800 minutes per month between the two of us. Now, we were using "DirectConnect" (walkie talkie) minutes with Nextel, which don't figure into the regular pool of minutes, but we plan on taking some form of family plan or in-network plan which will let us talk to each other free, so we're not taking those minutes into consideration.

Unless otherwise stated, all these plans are nationwide, and include free nights and weekends. That said, let's look at these four plans in more detail.

Cingular: Cingular has the "Nation FamilyTalk with Rollover" plans. Six hundred minutes would cost us $50/month, and Eight hundred fifty minutes would cost us $60/month. (plus $10 per additional phone) My early research led me to believe that Cingular required a two year commitment, but I later learned that while the two year contract has a lower activation fee, they do have one year contracts. Other considerations: listed as optional features are voice mail and detailed billing. I can understand the hidden fee for voicemail, but paying for detailed billing??
Activation Fee:$35, or $18 for a 2 year contract

T-Mobile: T-Mobile's FamilyTime plan is $70 plus $10 per additional phone, and includes Eight Hundred minutes per month. Just a bit more expensive than Cingular, but voicemail does not cost extra, and it's a one year plan. The issues I'm concerned about here are the coverage, which doesn't appear to be quite as extensive as the other networks, and the possibility of roaming. It looks like T-Mobile works roaming differently than other plans though. When you're roaming, calls that would normally be free count against your precious "whenever minutes". I'm also a bit concerned about night versus weekend time. The pamphlet says "free weekends", but the guy at the store told me that meant nights too. However, the pamphlet lists an additional fee for free nights. Which is true?
Activation Fee: $35

Verizon: Verizon has a Family SharePlan with Eight Hundred Minutes for $60, plus $20 per additional line. However, you've got to pay an additional $10 for free in-network calling on the extra line, although you can call between the two lines for free. I hear their network is very good, so hopefully the roaming fees shouldn't often come into play.
Activation Fee: $35 for one year contract, or $15 for two year contract

Nextel: It seems to me (although perhaps only because I currently have Nextel) that Nextel has the most limited and (intentionally?) confusing plans of all the above services. The closest thing they have to a family share plan is the "Team Share" plan and the "Shared minutes" plan. With both of these, calls between phones on the same plan actually cost double the amount of minutes, since these minutes are subtracted from each of your pools simultaneously, but Nextel hopes to make up for that with the fact that you can use the always-annoying DirectConnect feature between these phones. The Team Share plan would allow us 800 minutes per month for $70, plus $15 for an additional phone. The Shared Minutes plan would require us to get a 700-minute plan ($70) plus a 100-minute plan ($40). The only differences I can discern between the Team Share and Shared Minutes plans are that the Team Share plan can only have two phones as opposed to 2 or more on the Shared Minutes plan, the Shared Minutes plan has unlimited DirectConnect as compared to a limit of 250 minutes on Team Share, and of course the different minute increments on each of the two plans so as to make comparison between the two more difficult. In the end, we'd be looking at $85/month, plus $5 each for voicemail and $5 each for caller id. $105.
Activation Fee: $35 for one year contract

So which plan are we choosing? The main deciding factors turned out to be coverage area and equipment price. We had to rule out T-Mobile, as we live in a fairly remote area where their coverage seems to be spotty at best. We also had to rule out Cingular after we found that while their Connecticut coverage is excellent, it is not quite so excellent in the area of Brewster, NY where we live. Now we compare Verizon and *shudder* Nextel, both of which have good coverage in our area.

After speaking to folks representing each of the four companies, we found that a large part of the reason for our high bills was that Linda and I had each been on individual Nextel plans with a 300 minute limit. That's about my normal usage, but Linda regularly doubles that limit, as she uses her cell phone much more often than I. But Nextel's bills had been too craftily encrypted for us to recognise that fact. We also examined Nextel's "Value Plans", which offer 500 minutes for $40 or 1000 minutes for $60. The DirectConnect minutes are limited, but we seldom use those annoying things.

Linda (for God only knows what reason) likes Nextel, but wants a new phone. Hers was stolen in NYC some time back, and we had gotten the phone insurance, (extra $5/month each - they nickel & dime you to death!) so she received a refurbished phone which was very noticably not new. I hate Nextel, but will settle for whatever ends up being most financially sound. So comparing Verizon's shared 800 minutes for $80 to Nextel's 1500 (1000 + 500) minutes for $100, and considering that with Nextel we wouldn't need to buy new phones, we decided to stay with Nextel, damn it.

My main concern is the $40 in fees which if I'm not careful could bring our bill up to $140 plus tax and government-charges-us-so-we-opt-to-charge-you fees. I'm talking about $5 each for voicemail, $5 each for caller ID, $5 each for insurance, and $5 each for the pitiful service they call web access. We plan to dump the web access, and perhaps the insurance, (our phones are getting old, and we've been considering buying new ones) but we need the voicemail and want to keep the caller ID, although now that I think of it I may drop that on my phone and let Linda keep hers. But Joe from our local cell phone store, who was nicer than I'd expected someone from such an evil and annoying corporation to be, informed us that charges for those extras are based entirely on where you first sign up for your plan. We got ours in NYC - apparently a mistake. From now on, I will always get cell phones not from a Nextel store or a Verizon store, but from a company which sells multiple brands of phone. They're less interested in pushing one brand of phone on you, and can be more impartial. They also seem to give you better deals and packages.

So tomorrow, while Linda is working from home, I plan to visit Joe on Route 22 and act like I'm buying a car, in the hopes of getting him to waive the $20 for voicemail and caller ID. Wish me luck.