Mobile Frustrations

It seems I never pick "the right" mobile phone company.

Either that - or once I pick a good company - they go down the drain.

Over the years, we've used a lot of different companies for our mobile phone needs.

We started with a contract plan with Nextel in about 2000. After they started adding more and more to our already expensive plan - we canceled and tried prepaid - going to Trac Fone.

Trac Fone worked for a while, but the cost for calling was high...so we started looking again for a new plan.

We then went to ATT and loved it. The phones were good, the service great, the cost reasonable. When our son and daughter traveled to London, we made sure through ATT that they could call home and put international calling on the phones for the trip. What we had been told and what actually happened/we were charged for - were two different things. At this time, ATT became Cingular and their whole attitude changed. As soon as we could - we left ATT/Cingular.

I researched all the plans available at the time - and then contacted T-Mobile. Their customer service was wonderful and they set us up with a great plan for hubby and myself at a good cost and with OK phones. Time to renew to contract and we did - we were so happy with the service. We added on a phone for a child as well. All was good until the child got a "love interest" - suddenly - there were no more minutes on the shared minute plan - but T-Mobile never bothered to tell us (and this was before the days of being able to check usage online...). $600 in extra minute charges. I complained to T-Mobile's customer service and asked them why they couldn't send a text message to the main number on the account stating that all the minutes were used - or to cut the phones off. They had no answer, but did take off some of the charges. Next month, the same thing and I had, had it. I had already asked them to shut off phone service if the minutes got used - they said they would and they didn't. Having completed out one year contract - I canceled service. THEN - they tried to tell me I had made a verbal commitment to a two-year contract and they wanted to charge me an early cancellation fee for two phones. We are still fighting that one.

From there...the older kids - with jobs and income of their own - got their own plans under their own names. So I just had to worry about myself, the husband and two of the kids...

We were back to pre-paid.

We tried Net 10 - but the kids were into texting and since texts were charged on a per text basis - they used up their allotment quickly. Not good.

We tried ATT/Cingular Pay As You Go. This actually seemed to work well for us. Hubby barely used his phone, so topping his phone up every two months was good. Putting an unlimited text option for $20 onto the big text child's phone worked too - except then she only had $5.00 for calls for an entire month. The other child - used calls more - but $25 didn't go far enough for him. For me - most months, the $25 worked well - but when I was working - even $50 wasn't enough to cover my calls and text messages. At over $100 a month - this was getting too pricey for us.

Considering that by this time my husband was permanently disabled and we were living on a fixed income (disability payments) - we qualified for a government assisted phone. It is a Trac Phone and my husband uses it. He gets free time each month, and sometimes I need to put more time on his phone. When we first got the phone, I took advantage of a promotion available at the time, that doubled all purchased minutes for the life of the phone. So he is set for phone time and is happy.

Also by this time, the older of the remaining children now had a job and so got his own phone from Metro PCS. Researching again, I went to Metro PCS for the younger child and my phone needs. For the $80 a month we were spending - we got much more in a mobile phone than we had ever gotten before.

But then troubles with service and the phones started piling up. By the third phone replacement I was fed up. While at the store the sales person told me "deal with it" and he didn't care if I went to another company - I took his advice and left Metro PCS for what I thought was greener pastures....