Having recently cancelled my Verizon account, I've been doing some analysis of pay-as-you-go cellular phone services in the US. My friends currently in Europe may begin laughing at this point.
The major carriers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Virgin) all seem to have variants on the following strategies. Pay $X per day that you actually use the phone; and an additional $Y per minute following. Furthermore, you have to pay a (often quite high) minimum $ every month. I'll look at Verizon (hereafter: V) just for kicks.
V has the three options:
- sporadic @ X=$1, Y=$0.10 (plus free minutes for mobile calls to V phones);
- occasional @ X=$2, Y=$0.05 (plus free nights & weekends in addition to free V minutes);
- long-distance-relationship @ X=$3, Y=$0.02 (with the same perks as occasional)
On the other hand, there is another "tier" of providers exemplified by Tracfone. Since you can buy Tracfone phones at Target and Radioshack, and you can buy minutes at my bodega (!!) as well as online, I will assume that they are geared toward the poor and/or immigrants used to more liberal cellphone policies. Tracfone sells its service differently. Since they are a bulk reseller of spare bandwidth (minutes?) from the major carriers, this is not unexpected - for one, they don't have any notion of "nights and weekends" for I am guessing this reason.
With tracfone, rather than having a hard minimum per month, each purchase for $Z adds I minutes of talk-time and J days of subscription. If your subscription runs out, you have 60 days to resubscribe to keep your minutes but will likely lose your phone number. I was curious how this worked out in terms of X and Y (like in the other plans). Surprisingly, it is easy to translate if you make a few assumptions - read on! Tracfone has basically the following plans (it gets a little more complicated since they started a new offer which I'll detail later - it does not much change the essential result):
$Z I J
20 60 90
30 120 90
40 200 90
100 400 365
140 800 365
A simple (multiple) linear regression shows that this is consistent with 1) no start-up fee (\beta_0=0); 2) $0.10 per minute; 3) $1 per
week of use. Further, the R-squared is >= 0.996 (details available) so the linear regression isn't hiding much. Indeed, the residual error is around or under |$5|/year (!) for each plan. I am surprised by the consistency here, and again it
suggests a very conservative strategy on tracfone's part.
Thus, assuming that 1) you are interested in a "sporadic" type plan; but 2) you still use your phone at least once a week, tracfone is better than the alternative. If you didn't think that the "sporadic" plan was for you, I don't think tracfone would be either... (Also assuming that 3) there are no big qualitative differences between the carriers. Apparently, at least in major metropolitan areas, tracfone does just fine. YMMV.)
One problem with this analysis, is that I don't consider running out of minutes. This is where the new offer comes in. If you have a "doubling card", you get double the minutes with any refill, for the life of your current phone. The doubler costs $50, or comes automatically with the $140-plan above. Assuming you have a doubler, you can get minutes as low as $0.125 each if you buy 800 minutes for $100. This will also extend your subscription by a year, which can't hurt. Without a doubler, your best bet for minutes is to get them for $0.20 each with the $40-refill.
One caveat: if you are "roaming", your minutes are used up at a 2:1 rate - since they are a reseller of bandwidth, I don't know what "roaming" means. If you aren't in a MMA beware.
Anyways, it looks like tracfone fits me pretty well. Since I can get a basic phone for $15, I'll try out their service for $35 total. If this works OK, I'll get the $140 plan and see how that does me. That adds up to just about 3 months of Verizon service, and I get a "new" phone. Plus I can buy cell phone-time along with my six of Brooklyn Double Chocolate Stout while waiting for the frazzled guy in front of me to fish out enough coins for a 40. Awesome!
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
