Friday, February 5, 2010

The Rise of Page Plus

Page Plus Cellular has risen to become, in our opinion, one of the most desirable alternative cellular services, and this week they got even better. Their rise has followed the expansion of the Verizon Wireless network to the point where Page Plus, like Verizon, now offers service in most of the country. Page Plus uses the Verizon network, and does it at a very competitive rate that you can pay as you go. You can also pick up their $40 Unlimited Talk & Text plan. A recent rate adjustment lowered their per minute rate to as low as .04 a minute and this week they cut their Roaming fees in half, to .29 per minute.

T-Mobile's Prepaid has been our favorite low-cost plan for several years, but these new Page Plus plans have us considering them as the new leader in low-cost wireless. Their only downside is their 120-day expiration vs. T-Mobile's 365-day reset. Their Customer Service isn't growing as fast as the number of subscribers, so that may also be considered a reason for caution.

One of the considerations in Page Plus's favor is their lower acquisition cost. Their Activation fee is $10, but it can be had for less than $1 if you look around. The cheapest way to start service is to use an old, non-active Verizon Wireless phone. There are a lot of those around. That might include one you may be using now. While T-Mobile Prepaid can be used in any old T-Mobile or unlocked GSM phone, we need to cross the $100 of refills threshold before enjoying their Gold Rewards 1-year expiration time. T-Mobile allows no-cost roaming off their network, but with Page Plus there's little chance of losing your home network. And even when you do, Text Messages are still .08 each, Roaming or not. T-Mobile's .10 a minute voice rate is beginning to look expensive. Ain't competition grand?

5 comments:

Murry Katz said...

Having been with AT&T, T-MOB, Veriz, Metro POS etc., I'm blown away by Straight Talk.

To have the advantages of Verizon's solid network without paying their high fees is great.

And since it's sold at Walmart, I can always buy more airtime easily.

Very nice!

Trucker Mike said...

I am a truck driver that Page Plus left hanging. Something went wrong as I had 17 more days on my unlimited T&T Plan and 101 days till my balance was to expire and bam all of a sudden All my outgoing calls were greeted with balance has reached 0 and incoming were greeted with a welcome to Verizon message. I tried for 5 days to call them and either got all circuits busy or a we're closed message. I even tried sending a trouble ticket on their site with no response. I finally gave up and went back to Verizon. I would rather pay more and at least know I have support when things go wrong. I would like to say that this was the end of the story but it has been 8 days and Page Plus had still not released my number to be ported. Even the VZ porting department cant get through to them. I have had to give my temporary number to so many people already because of work that I decided today to end my frustration and just make the temp number they gave me my permanent number.

When my service worked it was good and well worth the price I was paying but when things go wrong your on your own. I do give credit to the dealers that tried to help me and would say that the majority of them are good kind honest people and they did everything they could to help, its the main office where I carry my gripes.

William said...

Mike, your comment is exactly the reason why I stayed with my current carrier, T-Mobile. I live in an area where GSM is king (regardless of what the maps may imply), and I considered switching to Net10's new $50 unlimited plan. It would have saved me about $12/month, and I already had an unlocked Blackberry to use the service with. But i've been hesitant...all I hear about Net10's customer service is nightmare stories, and I like knowing that even though i'm paying a little more each month, i'm getting my money's worth when it comes to the total package of my services.

Trucker Mike said...

William thanks for the reply. I have used Mountain Wireless for almost 3 years and its a shame that my first thing that I felt like I had to leave a comment about had to be so negative. I do agree that T-Mobile is good where they have either service or agreements however it was just my luck that one of the areas I delivered to a lot had almost no service on network or not. My wife is still with T-Mobile and has never had a problem. My wife also likes being able to pop in another card when she goes home to visit her mom and sister in Germany. As to the Page Plus situation Since this started about 2 weeks ago now I have ran into a couple of dozen other truckers that the same thing happened to. Same problem same lack of being able to make contact with Customer service. One trucker even missed a load because he didn't realize that his phone had quit working and ended up sitting for 4 days til another one came up. I was saving about $26 a month which ended up not being worth all this. I guess in the end lesson learned.

Oz Andrews said...

We got quite a bit of reaction and decided to respond in a new posting at: http://www.cellularnoise.com/2010/02/page-plus-reaction.html .