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Yes, users complain about dropped calls, poor customer service, burdensome
long-term contracts. Most of us get annoyed with noisy restaurant conversations,
unwelcome rings in movie theaters, distracted motorists. Nonetheless, more
and more Americans continue to sign up for cell phone service. As of mid-2002,
there were more than 137 million cellular subscribers in the U.S., spending
on average more than $500 per subscriber per year.
And while usage has roughly doubled over the past four years, average household
spending on cell phone service has remained largely unchanged during that
period. Cell phone users today get more minutes for less money than ever
before, and are being encouraged to use those minutes on an ever-increasing
array of services and features—from accessing the Internet to playing games
to sending instant messages. A small but increasing number of cell phone
users has even elected to pass up regular landline service and rely exclusively
on cellular service. The days in which cell phones were just for stranded
motorists and corporate powerbrokers are far behind us.
There are, in fact, plenty of appealing uses for cell phones. You can do
business or chit chat with friends during otherwise wasted hours sitting
in traffic. You can make arrangements and confirm arrival times. You can
be accessible when needed for business or in family emergencies. You may
be able to avoid danger by calling ahead to have others keep an eye out
for you, or by calling for help if your car breaks down on a lonely highway.
But these benefits have a substantial cost. Even the most parsimonious
cellular user can expect to spend at least $250 per year, and it’s easy
to spend many times that much. If you haven’t yet gone cellular—or if you
have and regret the move every time you get the monthly bill—it’s worth
considering whether you can meet your needs with a cheaper alternative.
After all, until a few years ago, most of us got along just fine with nothing
more than plain old telephone service and a little pay phone change in
our pockets.
But for many who have grown accustomed to the convenience of cell phones,
there is no going back. If that is your situation, this article should
help you think through your choices so that the next time you have the
opportunity to make a choice of service company and plan, you get the one
that works best for you and keeps your costs to a minimum.
We have evaluated the six companies that serve the Boston area with their
own cellular service antennas and networks: AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless,
Nextel, Sprint PCS, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless.
To think about your cell phone choices, it is helpful to have a basic understanding
of how these systems work.
When you use a cell phone to make a call, your message is transmitted as
a radio signal to a receiver/transmitter antenna set up by your cell phone
service company. The antenna might be located on a tower erected just for
that purpose or might be located on a building, water tower, or other high
place. The location of the antenna is referred to as a “cell site.”
From the cell site, the signal is transmitted to land lines. If your call
is to a regular wired telephone at a residence or business, the signal
will be passed on through a connection to the network of the local phone
company—Verizon, in most of this area. If your call is to the cell phone
of another customer of the same cellular company, your call might simply
be transmitted over your cellular company’s own wires to another cell site,
from which a radio signal will be sent out to that customer’s cell phone.
Each cellular company has been assigned a set of frequencies for its radio
signals. Your call is transmitted to the cell site’s antenna on a small
portion of your company’s frequencies and the other party’s voice is transmitted
back to you from the cell site’s antenna on another portion of your company’s
frequencies. Your cell phone has an antenna of its own to receive this
return transmission.
The frequencies assigned to your cellular company would be enough to carry
quite a few calls—just as the various frequencies on your FM radio dial
or television tuner can carry programs on quite a few stations or channels.
But there would not be nearly enough frequencies—or “channels”—to give
you and each of the cellular company’s other customers in the Boston area
your own channel on which to transmit your calls.
That’s where the idea of the “cell” comes in. Your little cell phone transmits
your phone call just like WGBH or WAAF transmits a radio program, but your
cell phone intentionally uses a very weak signal that doesn’t go very far.
The geographic area to which it reaches is described as a “cell.” Your
cellular company will design cells to be larger or smaller depending on
how many cell phone users it expects there will be within an area. The
company may design its system so that your phone’s signal goes only a very
short distance—perhaps just within a single building like an airport or
arena—or it might design the system in a low-population area so that your
signal reaches much farther—possibly as far as 20 miles.
The key is that another customer can use your frequency to send a call
to another antenna at another cell site without having to worry about having
your call get mixed up with his or her call so long as that other antenna
is outside of the reach of your transmission. In fact, many customers throughout
the Boston area can use the same frequency so long as they are geographically
far enough apart and the radio signals they send out from their cell phones
are weak enough that they don’t interfere with each other. This is similar
to the fact that radio stations in other cities can use the same frequencies
used by Boston area radio stations, just as long as those cities are far
enough away that the transmissions don’t interfere with one another.
As the number of a cellular company’s customers increases, the company
must increase the number of antennas and shorten the distance customers’
radio transmissions travel, thus creating more cells—and more opportunities
to reuse the same frequencies.
Your phone won’t transmit on the same frequency every time you call. The
company’s system is designed to tell your phone which frequency to use
so that your phone will be put on a frequency that is not currently being
used by another customer in the cell where you are currently located. Furthermore,
your cell will have only certain frequencies available to it, none of which
are available in adjacent cells—so that even if you are at the outer edge
of your cell, you won’t be near another customer using the same frequency.
This explains how a relatively small number of frequencies can be used
to handle thousands of a cellular company’s customers in the Boston area—if
all are sitting still. But a main point of cell phones is to be able to
move around—often drive around—while you talk. How is that possible? It
is possible because the cellular company has a central computer that senses
that the signal reaching your current cell site’s antenna is becoming weaker
as you move away from the antenna; this computer passes (“hands off”) calls
from one cell site antenna to another as you move from one cell area to
another. The computer simultaneously tells your cell phone to change the
transmission frequency it is using to one of the frequencies allocated
to the new cell. The hand-off should be imperceptible to you.
Cellular systems are set up on a geographic area by geographic area basis.
If you travel to another area, you will probably be able to use your cell
phone in that area, but you may be using it on a system owned by another
cellular company. Cellular companies in different areas have worked out
agreements and systems to connect with each other; depending on your cellular
service plan, you may pay extra when “roaming” in another area.
Of course, everything doesn’t always work as well as the theory. For example,
in a poorly designed system, there may be pockets where your cell phone’s
signal can’t reach a cell site antenna or there may not be enough frequencies
to accommodate all the callers within a cell, so your call may not go through
or might be dropped as you move.
The original cellular systems were designed to use “analog” radio signals.
In an analog cellular voice transmission, the frequency of the radio wave
used for communication varies in proportion to variation in the sound wave
of your voice. In the past few years, cellular services have migrated to
digital systems, with more than 85 percent of all cell phone subscribers
using digital systems as of mid-2002. In a digital system, the volume and
pitch of your voice are described by your phone system at the origin in
the 1s and 0s of computer language; then, at the destination, before the
call is delivered to the other party’s ear, those 1s and 0s are translated
back into a sound wave.
Digital transmission has several advantages. First, its signal is less
subject to certain transmission problems, such as static and fading. The
difference might be compared to the difference between a CD—which is digital—and
a typical cassette tape—which is analog. Second, digital systems can be
easily designed to provide such services as paging, voicemail, caller ID,
call waiting, text messaging, and Internet access. Third, digital phones
generally offer better battery life than analog phones. Fourth, digital
systems are likely to be able to find you a few seconds more quickly if
you have your phone on to receive calls when traveling to another city.
Fifth, digital phones are more secure. It is relatively easy for anyone
with a modified police scanner to listen in on analog calls or to steal
credit card numbers or PIN numbers you might punch in on an analog system;
someone listening in with a scanner to a digital call hears a sound much
like the sound you hear when you pick up the phone line on a computer modem.
From the cellular companies’ point of view, digital also has the advantage
that it allows them to handle more traffic in each cell. Several calls
can be handled at once on the same frequency because your speech can be
described in the computer code of 1s and 0s more rapidly than the speech
actually occurs. So the system divides up the time into tiny increments
and lets different calls take turns using the frequency.
In building up their digital networks, cellular companies have focused
their efforts on densely-populated metropolitan areas that offer them the
best chance of recouping their enormous investments in infrastructure.
From a coast-to-coast perspective, analog still has greater coverage and
service availability. Just about every area of the U.S. is still covered
by an analog system, and millions of consumers are still using analog-only
cell phones. The cellular companies maintain the analog systems for these
customers and also as a backup in case the digital systems can’t find a
signal.
The fact that different companies are all using digital transmission technology
does not mean their systems are compatible—that you can use your phone
on all the systems. First, there are two different frequency bands used
by cell phone services in the U.S. Some services operate in the 800 megahertz
(MHz) range and some operate in the 1900 MHz range. Second, there are several
different ways of coding and transmitting the digital information that
represents a phone call.
AT&T and Cingular currently use the TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access)
technology in the Boston area, although both are also building GSM networks
(see below) to accommodate next generation wireless features. A TDMA system
squeezes several calls into the same frequency at the same time by breaking
up your sequence of 1s and 0s into little strings and inserting strings
from several other callers between each of your strings. At the other end,
it is possible for the cell phone equipment to know which little strings
of 1s and 0s are yours by the order—the time sequence—in which they arrive.
For instance, the system might know that every third string is yours.
Sprint and Verizon use CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) transmission
technology. This technology also breaks up your stream of 1s and 0s into
little strings and mixes these strings with strings from other callers.
But with CDMA there is no requirement that the strings from the different
calls move in the same time sequence. Three little strings from your call
might be transmitted, then five from another caller, then one from you,
and so on. But each caller’s strings are marked with that caller’s code
(a few additional 1s and 0s) and the cellular system can sort out the hodgepodge
of multiple callers’ little data strings at the other end based on these
codes.
AT&T, Cingular, and T-Mobile use GSM (Global Systems for Mobile Communications)
technology in the Boston area. GSM is based on TDMA technology with other
features. It is the technology used in Europe and many other parts of the
world, although European phones use a different frequency band than AT&T,
Cingular, and T-Mobile use in the Boston area.
Nextel has its own technology which combines GSM and TDMA technology with
other features that make it work with Nextel’s special radio frequencies.
Almost all new cell phones sold today are either dual-mode, meaning they
are equipped to operate on both analog and digital systems, or tri-mode,
meaning they can operate using an analog system and two different digital
frequency bands. Having a phone with dual- or tri-mode capability means
you’ll increase your chances of successfully placing calls, since your
phone will be able to switch to a different mode if you can’t get a signal
using the phone’s primary mode. If you travel a lot, you’ll want a phone
with multiple modes so that as you travel in and out of networks using
different technological standards, you’ll continue to get a signal.
Nextel and T-Mobile are the only providers in the Boston area that do not
offer backup analog services. So their calling plans may not be good options
if you will need to use your phone in rural areas that are less likely
to be covered by their all-digital networks.
When you are choosing a cell phone service company, a key consideration
will be coverage. There are several aspects of coverage—
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From what locations will you be able to place, and receive, calls at all?
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From what locations will you be able to place, and receive, calls at your
plan’s lowest rates rather than paying higher “roaming” rates (and possibly
extra charges on long-distance calls)?
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From what areas will you get such services as caller ID and paging, which
are generally available only on a cellular service company’s own digital
network?
On our Plan Costs Table, we have included brief summary descriptions
of plans’ local, regional, and nationwide coverage areas as of late 2002.
Since the services are constantly building their local and national networks,
be sure to get a current coverage map before signing up with a company.
You can check companies’ websites for the most up-to-date maps. Naturally,
you will want to select a company that covers the areas where you live,
work, or travel often.
All of the services can claim coverage throughout at least the most populated
parts of New England. Since AT&T, Cingular, Sprint, and Verizon customers
primarily use dual- or tri-mode phones, which can switch to an analog network,
if needed, they for the most part have nationwide cellular coverage. Because
they rely on digital-only networks, the nationwide coverage for Nextel
and T-Mobile is likely to be more spotty.
Even within what a company claims is its coverage area, you might be disappointed.
Some claims may be exaggerated, and the companies can’t test every foot
of terrain. Poor coverage can exist along specific roads and in certain
areas, for example, because carriers have been unable to erect a nearby
cell tower or because tall buildings block signals.
The only way to be sure a service will reliably serve locations where you
will be making calls is to test it. One option is to check with friends
who use the service in areas you are concerned about; they will have a
lot of ready-made results from their own daily tests. Another option is
to buy a phone that you can return within 30 days and sign up for a service
plan you can cancel within two weeks or so. You can choose a plan that
gives you a trial period, or choose a prepaid plan where you have no commitment
beyond the prepaid minutes you purchase.
Another key to sizing up the available companies is to assess the quality
of the service they provide. Again, a good source of information on this
point is conversations with friends who use the various services. The data
we have collected on quality will help you focus on the cellular service
companies that deserve your consideration.
We surveyed area consumers and asked them to rate companies they had used
“inferior,” “adequate,” or “superior” on several aspects of service. Our
Ratings Table shows the percentage of each service’s surveyed customers
who rated it either “adequate” or “superior” (as opposed to “inferior”)
on the following—
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Being able to get connections wherever you are in the local area. Connection
problems might result from a company’s simply failing to build any coverage
for a location or from the company’s building too little capacity to handle
the volume of calls—so that sometimes the system is too swamped to handle
yours. This measure gives you a glimpse of the realities behind the pretty
picture of the coverage maps. This is the measure that seems to matter
most to consumers in their overall satisfaction with a company.
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Being able to get connections when traveling in other parts of the country.
Such problems might occur because a company doesn’t have coverage—or sufficient
coverage and capacity—in other parts of the country and has not made adequate
arrangements with other companies to supply service. If you travel often,
this measure will be critical to you.
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Not having calls dropped. As you move around, especially if you are driving
substantial distances, you may go into an area where your company has no
service or has insufficient capacity to handle current call volume. As
a result, your call cannot be handed off to a new cell and is dropped.
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Quality of sound. With digital systems, there tends to be less sound variability
than on analog systems, but even with digital systems you can have such
problems as having the sound break up, causing words or syllables to be
inaudible. Users rated all the companies relatively high on sound quality.
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How clearly charges are explained in advance. As we discuss elsewhere in
this article, the ways companies calculate charges are complex and can
be confusing, with time-of-day differences, on- and off-network differences,
and other variables.
Clarity of bills. Even if you couldn’t understand a company’s charges before
you began using its service, you would like to be able to figure out what
you are being charged for when you get your bill. Because of the many variables
in the pricing formulas, that is not always easy.
Accuracy of bills. In general, cellular service customers did not express
much dissatisfaction about billing accuracy.
Overall quality of service. We asked survey respondents to rate overall
quality of service. This let respondents take into account the service
aspects they considered most important and the degree of success or failure
of their company on each aspect. What matters most to you might not be
what mattered most to our respondents, of course, and the data on the preceding
questions allow you to weigh what matters to you.
The customer survey also revealed a few other facts—
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Respondents who said they used their cell phones mostly for business calling
tended to be less satisfied with their cellular service companies than
respondents who used their phones mostly for personal calling.
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Heavier users—those who used more than 300 minutes of cell phone service
per month—tended to be less satisfied than lighter users.
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Knowing how well a company has performed for you in another part of the
country is not a very good guide to how satisfied you will be with it in
the Boston area. We surveyed cell phone users in seven major metropolitan
areas and found different winners in different areas. For example, for
being able to get connections locally, Cingular scored above average in
the Boston area although it was the lowest scoring company in the Seattle
area; T-Mobile scored among the lowest in the Boston area, but was the
highest rated provider in the Minneapolis area. On matters that are not
dependent on the local network, however, the same companies generally rated
near the top in all the metropolitan areas. This was true, for example,
of the scores on billing system clarity and accuracy.
Looking at these data for the Boston area, Verizon and AT&T rank ahead
of the others. In fact, Verizon and AT&T ranked first and second, respectively,
on all three customer survey measures that have to do with making and completing
calls and on the “overall quality” question. On these key measures, T-Mobile
and Sprint ranked lowest.
While these conclusions will help you choose, keep in mind that they are
based on area-wide averages and therefore may not reflect the particular
calling pattern you will have. Our basic advice bears repeating: before
making a major financial commitment to a cellular service provider, check
out its performance where you live, work, and travel. You can compare our
data to the information you get from friends and neighbors or by signing
up with a cellular service company under short-term arrangements that allow
you to return your phone and cancel service without penalty.
When you have sorted out the companies on quality issues, you will need
to focus on cost and other features. We give you information on available
plans, as of November 2002. Companies’ offerings change over time, so you
will need to check details on company websites, but the information summarized
here will give you perspective on the range of options. There are several
questions to consider.
One of the first decisions you will have to make is whether you want a
“local,” “regional,” or “national” calling plan. The geographic scope of
your plan will determine which calls will require you to pay roaming charges,
which typically cost $.49 to $.79 per minute, and possibly long-distance
charges. It is important to note that each service defines its local and
regional areas differently. The Plan Costs Table
describes the coverage
areas of each provider’s calling plans.
If you will be making the overwhelming majority of your calls from the
Boston area, you may save $10 to $25 per month by signing up for a local
calling plan instead of a regional or national one. But remember that even
if you make just a handful of calls from outside your home calling area
each month, the roaming charges can add up quickly. Saving $10 on your
monthly service fee won’t make sense if you end up getting charged $.49
to $.79 per minute (plus possible long-distance charges) for 30 or so minutes
of roaming every month.
Some “local” plans might apply home-area (non-roaming) rates to more than
just the Boston area. For example, the home calling area for AT&T’s local
plans includes most of New England and stretches south along the Eastern
Seaboard all the way to northern Virginia.
Among national plans, the roaming rules may vary. For example, AT&T has
two national plans. With AT&T’s National Network plan, you pay no roaming
charges when you are on the AT&T-owned network, which covers most metropolitan
areas in the U.S. But when you must get access through another carrier’s
network, as is necessary in many locations around the country, you will
be charged for roaming. With AT&T’s Digital One Rate plan, you never pay
roaming charges, even if access is through another carrier’s network.
Similarly, Verizon has America’s Choice plans, which allow you to make
calls without roaming charges around the U.S. so long as you gain access
through the Verizon-owned network. To be able to make calls without incurring
roaming charges from areas where Verizon has arranged for you to get access
through another carrier’s network, you can subscribe to one of Verizon’s
National Single Rate or Express Network plans.
An advantage of plans that never charge for roaming is that you might save
even on local calls if you sometimes have to go into roam mode to get a
call through because of network deficiencies in this area.
The Plan Costs Table
gives you cost information on plans offered by
each of the cellular service companies we evaluated. The
Sample Monthly
Cellular Costs Table
shows how the different cellular service companies
stack up when their charges are compared for a few hypothetical users with
different usage patterns. As you can see, T-Mobile was a consistent winner
for price across all of our sample profiles. You can size up companies’
pricing systems against your own expected usage pattern.
The monthly cost of cellular service for most customers is primarily determined
by three factors: the monthly fee, the number of minutes of “free” talk
time (also referred to as “airtime”) included in that fee, and the per-minute
charge for additional minutes. Your airtime usage is calculated from the
time you initiate or answer a call until the call is terminated, whether
you made the call or received it. Advanced features such as e-mail and
voicemail also incur airtime charges. All of the carriers round partial
minutes up to the next full minute.
All of the cellular companies have various plans with different monthly
fees. In the plans with higher monthly fees, you generally get more “free”
minutes of talk time and pay lower per-minute charges for additional minutes.
Depending on the plan you choose, you usually get a separate allocation
of “free” minutes in “peak” calling hours and in “off-peak” hours. Peak
hours for AT&T and Verizon are defined as 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., Monday
through Friday. Peak hours for Cingular, Nextel, and Sprint are 7:00 a.m.
to 9:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. T-Mobile’s definition of “off-peak”
is limited to weekends only.
All providers now offer rate plans that lavish customers with free off-peak
airtime, often called “night and weekend minutes.” Some plans offer unlimited
free off-peak minutes and some offer so many free off-peak minutes that
you are very unlikely to use them up. For example, all of the wireless
providers now offer some plans that come with 3,000 or more night and weekend
minutes per month. That’s 50 hours of airtime per month for calls that
are made either during weekends or after 9:00 p.m. Even if you talked on
your cell phone for a whole hour every night after 9:00 p.m., and for three
hours a day every weekend day, you still would not consume all 3,000 night
and weekend minutes.
It almost always makes sense to choose the plan with the most monthly minutes
that you are sure you will use. The per-minute charges for going over your
allotment can be costly. For example, one of AT&T’s local plans gives you
800 peak airtime minutes for $49.99 per month (about $.06 cents per minute)
with additional minutes costing $.35 each. If you use 900 peak minutes,
and therefore exceed your airtime allotment by 100 minutes, your airtime
charges will have jumped, from $49.99 to $84.99, whereas you could have
signed up for the plan that would have given you 1,000 peak minutes for
$69.99.
On the other hand, you will waste money if you sign up for a plan that
comes with more minutes than you will use. So it pays to estimate accurately
and conservatively, then reevaluate your usage in the first few months
and adjust your plan accordingly. Once you are signed up with a particular
provider, it is easy to switch rate plans within that provider’s offerings.
To ensure that you don’t exceed your airtime allotment, you can usually
check the number of minutes you have used so far in a given month by accessing
your account information through the firm’s website, by calling customer
service, or in some cases, by checking a counter that you can bring up
on your cell phone.
Another option is to sign up for prepaid service (see our
Sample Prepaid
Plans Table
), see how long it takes you to use the minutes you prepaid
for, and then find a monthly plan that approximates those usage patterns.
If you sign up for a local or regional calling plan (or if you sign up
for a national plan that gives you its best rates only when you get access
through its company-owned network), you will pay roaming charges if you
get access from other networks. These charges are typically $.49 to $.79
per minute.
With some plans, you have to pay extra for long-distance calls—generally
$.20 to $.25 per minute.
If most of your calling is long distance and your plan does not charge
extra for long-distance calls, the extra amount you pay for the convenience
of being able to make those calls via a cell phone is small or, in some
cases, nothing. Suppose you would pay $.06 per minute with your landline
long-distance service. Paying an average of $.10 per minute, as you will
with many cell phone service plans, means you are paying only an extra
$.04 per minute for the convenience of calling via cellular service.
In addition to the charges for routine calls, your bill may include other
charges.
When you sign up for service and buy a phone, you will be asked to pay
an activation fee of $30 to $36, although you might be able to have the
fee waived under one of the frequent promotional programs offered by the
cellular service companies, or you might be able to get a salesperson to
waive the fee if you sign up for service at a retail location.
Directory assistance calls, priced from $.75 (T-Mobile) to $1.29 (Cingular)
per call, can easily add a few more dollars to your bill each month.
Cellular companies often run specials. Check newspapers and the services’
websites, or call the companies’ “800” numbers for current promotional
offers. Note that some providers will offer you three free months of wireless
Web access and then automatically begin charging you for this service when
the promotional period ends, unless you call up and cancel the feature.
One-year contracts are now the standard for all six of the providers we
evaluated. Only Cingular and Sprint allow you to avoid signing a long-term
contract, but with Cingular you won’t get any equipment discounts and with
Sprint you will pay an additional $10 per month for their month-to-month
billing options. Several companies offer incentives for signing a two-year
contract. For example, when we last checked, AT&T and Verizon were waiving
or discounting their activation fees if you signed a two-year contract,
and for some plans Sprint was offering unlimited airtime for calls made
between two Sprint PCS customers.
Two years is a long time in the fast-growing, fast-changing wireless industry.
The quality of each network can change considerably over time, depending
on such things as capacity issues, technological developments, and infrastructure
improvements, or lack thereof. At the very least, you should be absolutely
certain the service works well where you need it to work well—such as along
your daily commute and inside your office and home—before signing a two-year
contract.
All of the providers we evaluated will charge you a large fee, ranging
from $150 to $200, for terminating your contract early. You can, however,
switch plans with the same company during a contract cycle. See the sections
below on Try-Before-You-Buy Options and Prepaid Plans for tips
on avoiding early termination fees.
All of the cellular companies offer a menu of advanced features and services,
either for a fee or for free. Free services often include numeric paging,
caller ID, voicemail, call waiting, call forwarding, and three-way calling.
Fee-based services usually include wireless Web access, text messaging,
and roadside assistance. Some of these services can be of particular value
in connection with cellular service because they can save you substantial
airtime charges. Caller ID, for example, allows you to determine whether
you recognize the number of the person calling you before accepting, and
paying for, a call.
It is important to understand exactly how charges work for these services.
If you retrieve voicemail messages using your cell phone, you will be charged
airtime (and possible roaming charges if you are out of your home-rate
area). Consider checking your voicemail from a landline phone instead.
Also, when companies say call forwarding, call waiting, or three-way calling
is free, that means that there is no monthly charge for the service; be
aware that all the cellular companies will charge you airtime for these
calls. For example, you pay airtime for the full duration of a call you
have forwarded, and you pay double airtime—for both of the other parties
on the line—when you use call waiting or three-way calling.
Most of the carriers have special offers targeting families who need multiple
phones but want to share the same pool of minutes and a single monthly
bill. Verizon’s Family Share Plans, for example, allow you to share a pool
of minutes with one to three other individuals, each with his or her own
phone and phone number. You pay an additional $20 per month for each additional
line on top of the regular monthly fee for that plan. In addition to sharing
a pool of minutes, you get 250 mobile-to-mobile minutes that can be used
to call the other family members on the shared account.
In order to follow our advice and try out a service provider before committing
to a long-term contract and buying an expensive phone, you need to find
plans that permit such testing. Only AT&T offers a 30-day trial period.
Cingular, Nextel, and Verizon give you 15 days, and Sprint and T-Mobile
give you 14 days. If you do decide to return your phone and cancel service,
you will be required to pay for the airtime you used and any activation
fee that you may have been charged.
Many of these companies also run promotions offering a free basic cell
phone when you sign up for service. Since the quality of cell phone service
is much more dependent on the network itself than on the type of phone
you use, you can get a good idea of how the network performs with even
the most basic cell phone before buying a fancy phone with lots of bells
and whistles.
Our
Sample Prepaid
Plans Table shows a sample of prepaid plan options.
For under $100, there are several prepaid packages that include a cell
phone and $10 to $30 of airtime credit. Prepaid plans will be attractive
to you if you want to try out a service before making a commitment or if
you have poor credit. Prepaid plans also are a good option for parents
who want to give their kids a cell phone for emergency use without worrying
that the kids will rack up huge cell phone bills. You buy a set amount
of minutes, and then minutes are deducted from the account after each use.
More credit can be added to the account whenever you want, but service
shuts off when the balance reaches zero.
Depending on the wireless provider, you can purchase prepaid minutes in
denominations as low as $10 or as high as $150—the more minutes you buy,
the lower the cost per minute. The catch here is that the minutes expire
within 15 to 120 days after the deposit is made. Some plans allow you to
extend the life of your minutes if you add funds to your account before
all of the minutes expire.
In the near future, several companies are expected to launch a new type
of product that will provide an additional alternative for low-volume users
or people with credit problems—prepaid, disposable, recyclable cell phones.
These will likely cost $30 to $40 and come with about 60 minutes of talk
time that expires after three to six months. Some models will be rechargeable
and allow you to purchase additional minutes.
For the convenience of cellular service, you must pay a price. But a few
suggestions may help you pay less than you otherwise would.
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Shop for the cellular company and plan that will cost you least. Keep an
eye out for discount offers.
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Ask for special discounts—both when you are initially signing up and when
your contract is about to expire. Many customers get substantial price
breaks or special incentives if they show that they are high-volume callers
or that they have excellent payment records.
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Don’t sign up for more or fewer minutes than you are reasonably sure you
will use.
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Don’t make cellular calls if there is a landline phone available.
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Don’t give out your cell phone number freely.
Suggest to your caller that you call him or her back when you get to a
landline phone.
Take advantage of caller ID, voicemail, and numeric paging capabilities,
if your service offers them, to screen calls before accepting them and
to decline calls and call back from a landline phone.
When checking the voicemail messages on your cellular line, call in from
a landline phone, not from your cell phone.
If you already have a cell phone, periodically check to see if your provider
has a cheaper plan you can switch to that will meet your needs.
We evaluated cell phone service providers, not phones. Consumer Reports,
in an article in its February 2002 issue, evaluated the quality of several
different phone models and discussed features you should look for. That
article will be an excellent starting point in your phone selection process.
The following are a few considerations to keep in mind when choosing—
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The type of phone you use will have little effect on how often you experience
quality of service problems like dropped calls or access failures, since
such problems are usually caused by the network, not the phone.
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The price range for phones is wide. Most of the six providers run frequent
promotions offering you a free basic phone when you sign up for service,
but there are also phones that cost $500 or more.
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Even today’s most basic phones often come with features such as two-way
text messaging, the ability to store phone numbers and e-mail addresses,
a one-year warranty, and a small screen to use for Web-enabled features
such as checking stock quotes and sports scores.
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More expensive phones might include features such as voice-activated dialing,
a datebook, speaker phone capabilities, FM stereo radio, larger displays,
and a voice recorder you can use to record conversations or memos to yourself.
Some even come with an operating system that allows you to use the phone
as a personal digital assistant (PDA).
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Battery life can range from about 120 minutes to 360 minutes of talk time
in digital mode and typically about half as long in analog mode. In standby
mode, battery life ranges from several days to more than a week. Batteries
that give you more talk time naturally also give you more standby time.
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There is much variation in size and shape of phones, with smaller phones
typically costing more. Phones have even become a fashion accessory.
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You will increase your flexibility in getting calls through by having a
dual-mode phone; it can switch from digital to analog mode if all digital
circuits are occupied or if you are roaming outside of the reach of your
carrier’s digital system. You get an even more flexible ability to make
calls when traveling throughout the country if the phone can operate on
both the 800 megahertz and the 1900 megahertz frequency bands.
Just as it is a good idea to try out a cellular service, it is also wise
to try out some different phones. If you are buying from a store, this
will be a relatively easy task. In many stores the floor models are hooked
up and you can make a free local call.
Phone manufacturers typically specialize in providing phones that are programmed
to work with a certain digital technology, such as CDMA or TDMA, and on
a certain provider’s network. Sometimes the same phone model is sold by
two different carriers that are using the same network technology, but
that doesn’t mean that you can keep the same phone if you change carriers.
You won’t find much of a market for used phones. Most of the local pawn
shops we have checked aren’t interested in paying for used cell phones.
The ones that are buying are interested only in the newer, high-end models.
The cellular companies often offer a trade-in credit if you’re a new customer
signing up for a plan, or an existing customer wanting to upgrade, but
the credit is usually not more than $50.
Cell Phone Radiation
Stories in the popular media have suggested that the weak electrical fields
emanating from cell phones might raise the risk of brain cancer. Research
is ongoing, but there has so far been no definitive evidence that using
cell phones increases this risk.
In January 2001, an editorial appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine,
accompanying the results of a National Cancer Institute study on the subject.
The authors wrote: “We believe that it is highly unlikely that the use
of cell phones substantially increases the risk of brain tumors. The lack
of empirical evidence of the carcinogenicity of radiation at the radio
frequencies used by cell phones and the absence of a theoretical basis
for nonthermal effects at these frequencies suggest that cell phones do
not pose a risk of cancer.”
SAR, or specific absorption rate, is a way of measuring the amount of radio
frequency energy that is absorbed by the body. For a cell phone to pass
FCC certification, the phone’s maximum SAR level must be less than 1.6
watts per kilogram. At www.cnet.com you can find a radiation chart
that lists many types of cell phones and their respective SAR levels. But
keep in mind that these measurements are not very reliable and can vary
for the same phone as it is actually used.
If you are concerned about radiation exposure from cell phones, you can
keep distance between your body and your phone’s antenna by using a headset
or by buying a phone with a speaker-phone feature.
Using a Cell Phone While Driving
In November 2001, New York became the first state to ban hand-held cell
phone use while driving. Violators can be fined $100 for not using a headset
or other hands-free device. There is similar legislation pending in dozens
of other states. At least 28 countries, including Japan, Ireland, and Russia,
have banned the use of cell phones while driving.
Using a cell phone while driving can be a distraction that might lead to
accidents. Whether or not it causes more accidents than are caused by drivers’
adjusting their car stereos or eating sandwiches or lighting cigarettes
is a matter of debate. Regardless, a few precautions make sense. Don’t
dial while driving and consider pulling safely off the road to make your
calls. Headsets, voice-activated dialing features, and other hands-free
systems are a good idea for those who simply must use their phones while
driving.
Pacemakers
There is also some evidence that the radio frequencies from cell phones
may interfere with heart pacemakers and defibrillators. For this reason,
the Food and Drug Administration helped develop a test method to measure
electromagnetic interference by cell phones on these cardiac devices. This
test method is now part of a standard sponsored by the Association for
the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation and will allow manufacturers
to ensure that there is no dangerous interference between cell phones and
cardiac devices.
If you have a pacemaker and are concerned about interference from a cell
phone, keep the phone away from your chest; don’t keep it in your breast
pocket. Digital phones are more likely to cause pacemaker problems than
old analog-only phones.
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