Most Affordable US Prepaid Mobile Options
The specifics of different prepaid mobile plans are usually made to suit different kinds of clients, so it’s important know about your kind of consumption to choose the most convenient plan. For instance, do you text a lot, or call during off peak times? Do you occasionally surf the Internet, or make calls from outside your home state?
Most prepaid mobile companies offer plans where you charge the account associated with your cell phone number with a certain sum, such as $20 or $100, and then use it to pay for services such as calls, sending texts, listening to voicemail, and so on.
One important thing to watch is the duration of your credit. If you don’t top up your credit regularly, the credit will expire. The time this can take is variable, from as short as a single month to up to a year, and it’s one of the things that you should watch put for, especially if you don’t use your prepaid mobile a lot.
If you have no credit on your phone, you will still be able to receive calls, but after a time that can vary between four months and a year the line will expire and you will lose your number. In this case, you are faced with the option of paying to reactivate the line, or going through the hassle of getting another prepaid mobile phone number.
Coverage is another thing that people often fail to check. You may have a contract with the best operator but if you can hardly use the phone because of a lack of coverage, you aren’t going to use it. Make sure that you have good coverage.
Right now Virgin is probably one of the best prepaid mobile operators in the US, with a very good level of customer service and cheap pay as you go plans to boot. For 20$ you can get calls for only 0.10 cents a minute, which is very convenient. There is a credit rollover facility, but otherwise your unused credit will only last one month.
T-Mobile is usually considered the operator with the best choice of prepaid mobile handsets, and you can often get these at a cheaper price of you take them in conjunction with a pay as you go plan. Its cheapest payment option is $10 for 30 minutes, which is costly, but prices decrease if you top up for higher amounts at a time. And if you top up $100, your credit is valid for a whole year.
TracFone offers nice phones too, if somewhat more basic, and generally the call quality is very good. Prices are similar to T-Mobile, around 20 cents a minute depending on the prepaid mobile top-up amounts. This carrier is suitable if you want to top up small amounts more often.
MetroPCS also offers good service and rates, but its prepaid mobile service is only available in 33 states. This includes the most populous ones, so there is a good chance that this carrier will be available to you, though. Avoid it if you travel a lot out of state though, as their roaming and long distance rates are quite steep for prepaid mobiles.
There is also Cingular plan that is great if you don’t plan to use your prepaid mobile every day. Calls cost 10 cents a minute, plus a dollar for every day that you will use the phone to make calls. It’s good offer for occasional prepaid mobile phone users.
