Cell Phone Plans
August 8, 2005
You give your kid 300 cell-phone minutes per month, he ends up using 400 minutes, and you're off to the bank for a second mortgage on your home so you can pay the stinkin' phone bill.
To prevent that, Cingular has launched a new service called GoPhone. You pay monthly like any other plan, but as soon as the minutes are used up, the phone stops working until you pay your next month's bill or buy extra time online. (911 calls are always permitted.) It's a good way to teach your kids how to balance their budgets and their social lives. You can use the plan with any of Cingular's phones including the hip Motorola RAZR V3 and the slightly more tame Motorola V220 camera phone ($150) shown here.
Cingular isn't the only carrier trying to take the shock out of phone bills. In response to parents' grievances that their kids' text messaging is driving up their monthly rates, Verizon Wireless just introduced $5 per month unlimited in-network text, picture and video messaging. That means that your kids will have to find out who their friends' mobile carriers are. A $15 monthly plan lets you send up to 500 text, picture and video messages to customers of other carriers such as Cingular, Sprint PCS or T-Mobile.
You can also check out Sprint's Fair & Flexible Plan, which cushions the blow if you go over your monthly minutes. Generally speaking, instead of some insane penalty, you're charged $5 for every 100 minutes you go over your plan allotment.
Not to be left out, T-Mobile is promoting its prepay plan by giving away free concert tickets. If you live in an area where one of the concerts is being held—Los Angeles (Good Charlotte), Atlanta (Simple Plan), Denver (Ciara and Common), Chicago (Joss Stone), Philadelphia (Gavin
DeGraw) and New York (Kelly Clarkson)—you get two vouchers for concert tickets when you buy a T-Mobile To Go starter kit; if you buy a $25 refill card, you get a voucher for one ticket.
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