<p>Most of my Ds college friends kept their home area code phones. D went with the college area code phone (at my insistence). I wanted local college people to be able to get ahold of her without making a long distance call. Turns out that she doesn’t get local calls–most calls are from her friends, who call long distance from their cell phones even though they are only a dorm door away.</p>
<p>As for how to limit minutes, D uses very few of her minutes. Most of the calls she makes are on the weekend or late at night. I was pretty surprised actually. All of this may change for any kid who has a gf or bf, which is where I’ve heard the minutes used can multiply exponentially.</p>
<p>It may be kind of late now, but if you are still considering different plans, some services (Cingular, Verizon, Sprint, etc.) get better reception in different parts of the country or at different college campuses. You should go to the college-specific portion of CC and post to find out which cell phone plans work best for current students at that college.</p>
<p>Pafather,
You are so right! We had a family plan with one provider who is national and had every expectation that D’s college about 900 miles away in a large city would have excellent coverage from this provider.</p>
<p>Wrong! She could barely use her phone in her dorm room…often had to go out on the porch to get decent coverage. After one semester, we had to switch her carrier. With S, going to college this fall, I checked with the college-specific section on CC to see which carriers seemed to have the best coverage. </p>
<p>We won’t make the same mistake twice. Especially with the contract provisions and hefty fees for switching, this is an important consideration.</p>
<p>D has our area code–she’s only in the next state and didn’t want to change her number. I expect she’ll change it to her job state when she graduates. Her profs mostly use email and she has a dorm phone.</p>
<p>S had an Hawaii area code when in high school (because no one wanted to pay the charges to call the mainland) and wanted to switch when he went to college (because no one wanted to pay the charges to call Hawaii) so he went with his college area code so that profs (etc.) could call. None of his friends seem to mind. </p>
<p>Frankly I find all the plans so confusing that I just found the cheapest one I could that gave my husband lots of minutes and let the rest of us share the leftovers. About once every 6 months I go back to Cingular (it used to be AT&T Wireless) and ask them if they’ve got anything cheaper that meets our needs. Sometimes they do. The latest switch reduced our monthly bill from around $225 to $175 (five phones, billions of minutes for H, email and messaging for S, etc.).</p>