Those of you who have used VirginMobile cell phones, did you find that the system works ok?
Now I'll finally need a cell phone but only for the occasional brief call. No gazillion minutes and I absolutely won't sign any two-year contract. As usual the coverage info is very crude and the only way to find out was actually trying it. So, someone used his SpintPCS phone (same network) and got two bars in the lab here. Before it was zero bars for all the carriers which is one reason I never had a cell phone.
There are lots of pre-paid plans, very confusing. But even though Virgin is very expensive on calls to overseas they don't charge any roaming and seem to have the longest expiration time for pre-paid minutes. I'd rather have a GSM phone, but oh well.
I've used Virgin prepay for years. Currently I use a Lobster phone, which is tint and rather pretty. Like you I only use it for emergencies and incoming. The signal strength seems to be rather phone dependent rather than provider dependent. My big old Alcatel phone could get a better signal in the same area, but it is literally about 5x the volume and weight of the Lobster.
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Dirk
The Consensus:-
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Thanks, that is good to know. I am probably getting the Vox8610. They only offer a refurb, whatever that means. Hopefully they give out new batteries with them.
There are currently only five phone to pick from and I don't need a fancy one. Didn't see a Lobster phone there though and AFAIU you have to use their phone or it may not work. And theirs don't work for other carriers either. That's easier in Europe with the SIM cards. They also won't work in Europe which would have been nice.
Net10 offers much better overseas rates but their minutes expire fast and it's a higher monthly minimum.
Reception is rather iffy out here so one can only hope that the phone's RF section is good enough.
Like you I hate the contract plans. Virgin Mobile has worked well for me for the past couple years versus previous contract plans with other companies. I travel sporadically, might go three months without travelling and then use the cellphone extensively for a couple months. Although more expensive per call during the periods I'm using it heavily, it's a lot less overall, and I still have it available for emergency and other local use when needed.
By the way the Virgin pre-paid minutes don't expire, you just have to buy another 20 bucks worth at least every 90 days. Thus if you didn't use the phone at all for six months you would wind up with $40 of pre-paid minutes. But I've not found that a problem in the long term, sooner or later I need the minutes.
Regarding overseas, a way around the problem is to use a calling card with one of the inexpensive long-distance providers. I use 3U Telecom but it depends upon which countries you call a lot. Program the phone for it.
Be carefull of electing (if you get a choice) voice-mail. With any of the carriers you (afaik) you get charged for those incoming calls. On previous plans I've had people mis-dial from bars (could tell from the background noise) and forget they had the phone off-hook; uses up the minutes. I've decided no voice mail on the cell-phone, they have to call my regular phone for that.
Virgin uses the Sprint network and coverage can be a problem if you're away the the interstates and major metropolitan areas. It's been a problem for me in one place I go from time to time. It's a downside I've accepted. I've found their coverage map on the web to be pretty accurate.
Alas if you don't get good signal in the areas you need it most of the time, then wouldn't be a good choice.
Also by-the-way, on the contract plans in my experience you don't have to sign up for a new contract once the old one expires. Previously I would sign up for a one year contract and then ignore the requests to re-signup. They never cancelled me and I could continue to use the previous plan as long as I continued to pay the bill. Of course that meant foregoing the 'improvements' offered to sign up for a new contract.
That's what a lot of people realized after they let their contract expire and switched. Some of them were just blowing away remaining minutes every month on calls they'd normally not bother to make.
Well, yes, unless you use the day2day plan which charges 35c/day but avoids the 10 daily 25c-minutes. Those can eat cash fast. I think the math shows the cost crossover at around 7 days usage/month. I don't know if they let you ping-pong between day2day and minute2minute before and after every trip.
Yes, that's also what European folks use, except that they pay a lot less than we do nowadays. Occasionally line or sat link quality can be quite iffy, like dropping out echo cancellation or that nasty 'squelch' thing. That's why I use an AT&T 10c plan for land line now where 90%+ of calls are of excellent audio quality. If one wasn't, a re-dial always worked.
Oops. I thought you could check VM from a land line phone. At least they should not bill the whole message as air time when you stop and cancel an obvious lengthy mis-dial message. In areas like ours where cell service cuts out a lot a cell phone without voice mail isn't really practical. Thanks for the alert.
Sure, but they still want that initial 1-2 years deal signed on the dotted line. Sight unseen, if the service doesn't work for you at some point you can't get out without a huge fine. Although California has a few weeks of cool-off, IIRC.
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