<p>Would anyone care to share what company they use, why they like it, and perhaps even what phones are currently considered the best?</p>
<p>AT&T/Cingular is driving me absolutely crazy. My Cingular phone has good reception (GSM), but if you ever try to call them for anything, the voice-activated system with utterly confusing menu selections has driven me into screaming fits (I know, I have a short fuse, hence my name)…</p>
<p>Any special deals out there for college students? What type of calling plan? etc…our shared minutes contract is up and I am looking to switch…:D</p>
<p>We’ve had Verizon since it was Air Touch Cellular. Their customer service is absolutely top notch. This week Verizon introduced new rates for family share plans.
Definitely check them out. Also, if you’re not happy, you can return the phone within 2 weeks and are charged only for the time you’ve used. </p>
<p>S hardly uses his phone now, but when he leaves for college I am going to add a text message package to his plan because it seems so many kids use this feature.</p>
<p>Patient:
We’ve had Cingular for several years- the customer service trick is to go to your local company store, not call the 800#.
I live in an area that gets a lot of international roaming, by accident…it’s a pain to ahve to call, but they people in the store have been quite helpful, much better than calling in!
We have a family plan, began with 1 phone for my daughter and now have several lines (at $9.99 extra)
Text messaging for college kids seems mandatory!</p>
<p>We had Verizon and they were not helpful with the roaming issue, ATT (before it was CIngular) was also a pain, so I don’t knwo if Cingular will begin to take on those characteristics.</p>
<p>I have verizon and so does my brother, and just recently my mom added a line to my plan for her to use - all of the other providers we looked at weren’t good both at home for my brother and at school for me, plus i can talk to any other verizon customer at any time for free, have great coverage, and good reception</p>
<p>wanted to mention it’s worth checking out the school the child will be going to b/c some services get different reception quality in different places, and you’ll want good reception at your school.</p>
<p>We have Cingular (three different plans…don’t ask why!). I honestly think we will be switching to Verizon when these all come due in August. I’ve about had it with Cingular and their botched up billing department. We have had them bill the wrong phones to the wrong accounts several times and it takes them MONTHS to fix their errors. I’m willing to give another company my business at this point…and we’ve had Cingular since it was Linx. While I am bashing Cingular, I will say that the coverage in New England is very good and it is a good plan for DS who is in college. We can also talk mobile to mobile with no charge (except when the screw up the bill).</p>
<p>I second the horrible Cingulair/ATT customer service. I once waited 1.45 hours on hold because I was desperate! (Thank goodness for speaker phones). I think we’ll check out Verizon once our contract is up. Turns out text messaging for teens is “essential.” We learned the hard way. Our plan originally had 10 cents per text message. The first month that our 14-year-old D had her phone, she made somewhere around 210 texts!!! We’ve since upped it to 100 “free” texts and if she goes over, we take the phone away!</p>
<p>I have a T-Mobile phone… it’s a family plan with my parents. we have 400 minutes per month during regular hours, unlimited weekend/night hours, and unlimited mobile to mobile minutes. basically that means we can call each other for free whenever we want, and we can call anyone for free nights and weekends, and all that counts is our calls during the day m-f. </p>
<p>we have four phones on the plan… it was 40 dollars initially, then 10 per line… so it’s 70. my sister and i both have insurance on our phones, so it’s about 80 per month for four phones… 20/each.</p>
<p>momof2inca…we could trade stories! At&t was flawless, but since the merger I’ve had all kinds of snafus–bills not being registered as paid even though they were, my phone number showing up on strangers’ phones and them calling me mad, and that <em>!)(#K</em> voice-activated system that has choices about as relevant as “Restaurants in the antarctic” and “Ping Pong Trivia” instead of “Billing questions” and “Problems with your reception”…</p>
<p>Anyway, good point about checking with the schools. I failed to mention that Guess Who has a sweetheart deal with Stanford, students get discounts on phone service and phone purchases if purchased through the Stanford system, and the reception has been described as “awesome”. But for the rest of us, I am leaning toward Verizon…I also heard that at Williams, Verizon is the ONLY service that gets reception there, not sure if that’s accurate but I know my phone didn’t work when we were there…</p>
<p>We asked around at his school and the concensus was that Verizon was the only service that was reliable in the dorm and in different buildings around campus. Since he didn’t want to stand out in the cold to talk on his phone, we went with Verizon (family plan). Unlimited minutes with Verizon customers). Free nights and week-ends, so he can talk to the gf as much as he wants. We’re very happy with it. (BTW, we switched from AT&T and I can’t believe how much more I like the service, reception, plans, etc.) And it works great in the dorm.</p>
<p>We also have the Verizon family plan. It has worked well for the most part, except that my son’s dorm room gets poor reception, so we have to wait for him to call us; we can’t call him and get through reliably at all. It worked great, however, when my younger son went on a cross-country tour with his orchestra. We were even able to track down a left-behind tux while I was here in Oregon, and he was on a bus in Vermont. (It was his roommate’s tux, not his, so at least HE wasn’t in trouble!)</p>
<p>Slightly off topic, but I think it’s important:</p>
<p>If there is a chance that your kid may be living or studying abroad - go with a provider of GSM service – I think that would include ATT/Cingular or T-Mobile. You will also want an internationally-capable phone, because the GSM frequency used in the US is not the same as used in Europe – but that can be purchased later. (An international phone, sometimes called a triband, is able to switch frequencies). </p>
<p>I simply cannot say enough how much I appreciated having a phone that could be used for international text messaging during the past 4 months while my daughter was living abroad, including a short period while I also was traveling in Europe.</p>
<p>Special note to Momof2inca:<br>
When my daughter was abroad, I increased the text messaging allotment to 750 free messages, with 3 cents a message thereafter ($9.99/month) She could also use AOL instant messaging via her cell phone. Have you ever wondered what 3000 x 3 cents is? Well, I literally got an 81-page phone bill with more than $90 worth of messages – ended up splitting the cost with my daughter - and encouraging her to at least use the text message feature efficiently. (What irked me was the thought that there must have been hundreds of messages such as “LOL” or “ok” or “bye”). The good news is that while she was gone, we stored up a lot of rollover minutes – so now that she’s back the bills should go down.</p>
<p>I would like to second calmom’s recommendation of GSM phones, and the reminder about getting a phone with non-United States frequencies. Mobile phone use is even more pervasive overseas than in the United States–in Taiwan the number of subscribers exceeds the national population. I ended up with T-Mobile (formerly Voicestream) here in the States because I started using mobile phones over there, and already had a three-frequency GSM phone.</p>
<p>We have a family plan with ATT Wireless. Unlimited anytime calls between our 4 phones, unlimited nights and weekends starting at 7:00 pm, 600 anytime peak minutes and our bill runs about about $120/month taxes and fees included. With having 2 sons, the text messaging is virtually non-existent…we usually end up having to pay for ones they “receive”…</p>
<p>I would say that you should talk to the students on the campus of the school your child is going to and see which service has the best reception on campus. Here at UCLA, for example, Verizon is the only one that gets decent reception. Cingular/ATT, Sprint, etc. all drop calls all the time, and reception is horrible in buildings (my friends always have to sit by a window to keep the call lol). So take that into account.</p>
<p>Around here, ATT used to drop calls frequently. I find that is no longer thae case. The merger with the Cingular network should provide additional enhancements to the already much-improved network. Here’s what we have on GSM w/ Cingular:
Me-
GSM America National Plan: 1600 mins for $99/mo
100 Addnl Mins for Life - Free Bonus
Unlimited Nights and Weekends - Free
Unlimited Mobile to Mobile - Free</p>
<p>Son’s only differece is that he has a $75 plan that gives him 1200 mins/mo and a Text Message Plan for 300 free texts. </p>
<p>We also pay $5 per phone, per mo for the equipment insurance, which really isn’t a great deal because you have to pay a $35 deductable if anything happens anyway.</p>
<p>My duaghter has had Verizon for about 7 years, never had a problem gets great reception everywhere (haven’t used it internationally yet).</p>
<p>She has the America’s choice nation wide calling plan 500 anytime minutes, unlimited nights and weekends , free long distance no roaming 39.99/month. For those who work at large corporations find out if there is a corporate discount for employees (especially if your company provides work related cell phones- there will definitely be a discount that is rolled down to employees). Our company gives a a 23% corporate discount with a number of carriers.</p>
<p>Before running out purchasing a paln you should also check to see what your school offers. Dartmouth has free long distance for their students from their dorm phone. Students also “blitz” (e-mail, chat0 with each other through out the campus, because there are many computers available to check your blitz. Sudents don’t walk around campus with cell phones attached to their ears (kind of frowned upon) . I find that when I get her phone bill the only calls on her phone is when she calls home, if some one is on the phone in their room or they have a phone plan with roaming etc, she doesn’t mind using her cell because she says it’s a free call anyway.</p>
<p>We used to have Verizon, but between the outrageous customer service and the fact that it didn’t work in a few areas (including the school my oldest went to and our house) we dropped all three (they still owe us money, it’s been four years) we switched to Cingular.</p>
<p>We, too have the family plan which for us works extremely well. We have 850 minutes with free nights and weekend and free mobile to mobile plus those wonderful rollover minutes. The beauty of it is that even if they happen to talk a lot (which is hard to do if all your nights, weekends and calls to other cell phones are free) we have built up enough rollover minutes between the three of us that we can virtually talk forever now. You can also do most of your inquiries on their web site and avoid having to call them. But I must also say, that I have been extremely happy with their customer service.</p>
<p>We switched from AT&T to Verizon about two years ago and have been quite pleased. My daughter and I share 800 peak minutes on a family plan with unlimited night and weekend service and (and in-plan service too I think); the other members of the family are on single plans. Our children are several hundred miles from home, and it is wonderful to be able to make a call to or from virtually anywhere in the U.S. as part of the overall plan (assuming the ability to stay within the allotted monthly minutes).</p>
<p>Schools do vary in the phone plans available to students; Dartmouth sounds like a great deal but that’s not necessarily the case elsewhere; at my daughter’s school the kids rarely use their room phones at all even for local calls despite fairly reasonable rates. Text messaging is a big thing at least on my daughter’s campus and probably elsewhere, so you might want to get a plan that includes a text mesage package (100 messages for $2.99 for example). </p>
<p>Before committing to a specific carrier make sure it has good reception in the area where your child will be going to college, and check the service maps to determine if there are large roaming areas nearby. (For example, there is a stretch of I-91 in northern Massachusetts that for some reason is a roaming area for Verizon, and then stretches of I-91 in Vermont with no service at all though roaming charges no longer apply!); years ago, the whole state of West Virginia was considered a roaming area on our AT&T plans.</p>
<p>Wow. I seem to be in the monority here with a Sprint shared minutes plan. My s. and I share 2000 minutes/mo plus free sprint-to-sprint calls.The deal I got ($85/mo) may not be available now, but it doesn’t hurt to ask them. I think I pay $5 for unlimited text messages, photos and internet access. I love getting the photos from his phone sent to my computer. The one of his room all cleaned up was a real shocker!! As an aside, many companies have discounts-- we get 5% off our bill because we are
USAA members, and with a Sprint cell I get a great deal on my home landline long distance (50 min free/mo and $.07. min after that, or something like that).</p>
<p>My H. and younger s. share a Cingular plan (it just worked out that way-- his is through his business). They have a rollover minutes plan. When we were in the Bahamas over xmas, their phones worked, mind and my older s’s didn’t.</p>