Cell Phone Upgrade

At the end of ATT cell phone contract. (Cell only – not smart phone. yes, I’m obsolete!) Two phone plan for me and wife. Looking for upgrade to least expensive smart phone plan. Like $100 a month or less. Don’t need much data, probably 1 gig or less. Would prefer to purchase phones up front with no contract. Used phones are an option. Is this even possible??

Seems all the adds for low monthly plans are all BS once you go in and get the details. Grrrr!

Any help would be great! PM’s welcome.

Thanks, J.

Just went through this as wife’s former employer was handling her cell service. If you want the “free phone” you basically have to pay for each one under the contract. The only way I know to keep it under $100 and still have a good service plan is to bring your own phone into a monthly plan. There are lots of used iphone 4 models out there, so while it might be a pain it’s not an unrealistic option. We use a AT&T share plan and it works pretty well for us. Check out AT&T Next — you should be able to get a monthly deal for two phones with 2gb of shared data for $90 or so if you bring your own phone. Not sure if that includes taxes. That said, Verizon seems to have better coverage in rural (i.e. non-metro fishing) areas and I don’t know anything about their plans. Hope this helps.

You might also check into Smart Talk via Walmart. Again, bringing in your own Smart phone will bring the biggest savings.

FDR

No one even comes close to what T-Mobile offers. Their coverage keeps getting better, and better. If you dont need a smart phone, get an old GSM phone (Nokia works best) and use the GSM system T-Mobile has…..problem solved. I think you will be pleasently surprised. FYI T-Mobile has been named #1 in customer care by JD Powers also, so they are getting their act together….

Just went through something similar. Almost went Smart Talk but the process was a bit too cumbersome for me. I whittled down existing ATT account to almost match Smart Talk. The bill yesterday was $60 but my wife doesn’t use much data.

my wife and i have the tmobile no contract plan, unlimited talk, text and data. after so many gigs, the data slows down to about half speed. when wifi is available, you don’t use up your data. cost is about $80 a month for 2 phones. you buy the phones outright, about $500 a piece, i don’t know if used phones can be used or not. reception isn’t as good as some other carriers, but i don’t need a phone 100% of the time. i would recommend it. the walmart plan is similer but after checking into it, i went with the t-mobile plan. by the way, we did it all over the phone and the phones arrived in a day or two and we haven’t looked back. these are our first smart phones and it was a year in april. we both use texting and the data, we never thought we would

What kind of coverage are you looking to get? Time and time again fishing/hunting trips when all the other guys fail to connect Verizon is always there. Compared to others it has always been the most reliable in the city as well in regards to our business needs, although you pay for quality $$. My 2 cents.

I should add not sure on the laws yet, but Mr.President I heard was getting ready to sign something that allowed used phones to be transfered to different carriers no probs. Might bring the used phone market up to attention for ya, good or bad…

We have straight talk through Walmart. My son bought a used Galaxy S3 on ebay for $200. They use the Verizon towers and I rarely have signal loss. The only downfall is if you need customer service, the are obviously not in the US.
DT