Consumer Reports says prepaid has better deals
September 21, 2009/
T-Mobile currently has a promotion running, Mobile Makeover, which alleges to find you the best deal on a mobile service plan, based on your needs, regardless of carrier. It’s supposed to be them playing the good guys, turning away customers if they can find better deals elsewhere, rather than trying to make the sale at all costs. For the service they partner with BillShrink.com, a site which compares cellular plans across carriers. The only problem is that BillShrink only compares major carriers. Consumer Reports tackles the issue, noting that oftentimes prepaid carriers have cheaper plans than their postpaid counterparts. From the Consumer Reports blog post:
Conspicuously missing are four national prepaid carriers—Boost Mobile, Net10, Tracfone, and Virgin Mobile—which together serve some 22 million price-conscious U.S. customers. That’s an important omission, because we found that Boost and Virgin typically had the lowest-priced deals when we compared 152 national plans, as we reported in the September issue of Consumer Reports in “Prepaid pays off.” We searched through national plans offered by eight big contract and prepaid carriers for a range of sample cellular consumers using various amounts of voice, text messaging, and mobile Internet services. Prepaid plans from Boost or Virgin were the least expensive in nine of 11 comparisons.The only two which Boost or Virgin didn’t lead were for family plans, long the strong suit of the major carriers. Other than that, it’s prepaid on top. ]]>
Posted in Consumer Issues
True! T-Mo’s ‘makeover’ and billshrink are talking bull. Show me the contract that can compete with my Straight Talk unlimited at 45 bucks and I’ll think about switching. The only real competitors are other prepaid providers. The reason why I chose ST is because they run on the Verizon network which is the best IMHO.
Prepaid is definatly better than the big companies. 22mil people know it so it must be true.
Im a Net10 user. they are great, New phone and 300minutes for $30 and there are non of the ugly hidden costs.
I like that there is no contract to overspend and sometimes i think you actually get more bonuses being on prepaid. 🙂
The BillShrink thing IS BS.
When you read their CEO’s comments, you can see that he’s kind of clueless about prepaid.
Straight Talk’s $45 deal is awesome. The fact that it utilizes Verizon’s network and provides unlimited talk and text is amazing.
Maybe next time the Shrinkmeister will get with the (PREPAID) plan.
LOL!
I’m with Sam. Net10 is great. I also got the 300 minutes free upon activation deal, but cheaper than cheap international rates was the thing that sold me on Net10. It’s hard to beat 15 cents a minute to just about any corner of the globe. Whether it’s south America or New Zeland, it’s all the same.