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For the last couple of years, I've had a Virgin Mobile prepaid phone. I use my mobile seldom enough that this makes sense for me: this way the minimum expense is $20/90 days, and I'm probably averaging about twice that.
The phone needs replacing (it's old, the 7 key doesn't work well, and one of the built-in function keys is also getting less and less sensitive). As far as I can tell, my options are to get another Virgin phone; switch to T-Mobile, in which case I'd still need to buy a new phone; or look for a relatively inexpensive contract, rather than one that will cost me lots of money for zillions of minutes I won't use.
The main problem with Virgin is that the Sprint network doesn't give me a good signal at home, and no matter how often I tell people to try the landline first, sometimes I miss calls because they don't. The secondary problem is that it's a US-only network, but T-Mobile would charge me fairly high for calls in Canada, so I I wouldn't use it much, if at all, while up there (which is only a couple of weeks a year anyhow).
T-Mobile claims decent signal strength to my apartment, though less once I get into Inwood Hill Park, but I have no idea of whether that's true. Since I'm between two ridges, one of them a city park, with a river and then a cliff to the north, I suspect nobody has really good signal here.
If you've had really good, or really bad (or really weird) experience with T-Mobile, or have opinions for or against the phones Sprint or T-Mobile is currently offering for prepaid, please pass them along. Ditto if you like your mobile phone company and they have a contract that seems to suit my needs.
The phone needs replacing (it's old, the 7 key doesn't work well, and one of the built-in function keys is also getting less and less sensitive). As far as I can tell, my options are to get another Virgin phone; switch to T-Mobile, in which case I'd still need to buy a new phone; or look for a relatively inexpensive contract, rather than one that will cost me lots of money for zillions of minutes I won't use.
The main problem with Virgin is that the Sprint network doesn't give me a good signal at home, and no matter how often I tell people to try the landline first, sometimes I miss calls because they don't. The secondary problem is that it's a US-only network, but T-Mobile would charge me fairly high for calls in Canada, so I I wouldn't use it much, if at all, while up there (which is only a couple of weeks a year anyhow).
T-Mobile claims decent signal strength to my apartment, though less once I get into Inwood Hill Park, but I have no idea of whether that's true. Since I'm between two ridges, one of them a city park, with a river and then a cliff to the north, I suspect nobody has really good signal here.
If you've had really good, or really bad (or really weird) experience with T-Mobile, or have opinions for or against the phones Sprint or T-Mobile is currently offering for prepaid, please pass them along. Ditto if you like your mobile phone company and they have a contract that seems to suit my needs.
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If you are planning to travel to Europe or other parts of the world that have GSM networks, get a tri-band or quad-band GSM phone. Buy it unlocked if you can, or you can always pay a hacker to unlock it for you. That enables you to plug in a different SIM card so you can have a local phone number in another country and pay only local rates. This is a big convenience because you don't have to buy or rent another handset, so you're not only saving money, you still have your contacts in the phone.
It might be worth going with Verizon for the customer service. However, I have not used their pay-as-you-go plans, and it appears they involve daily or monthly charges even when you don't use the phone. You might be better off with a monthly plan with a low number of minutes.
I don't know of any reason to go with Sprint/Nextel.
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