Joining the century: Part 2

It has been a few months since I've written here as I've been busy working on my reading goal for the year (more to come on that later). I plan to write more consistently as the new year comes. I wanted to make a quick post to share a deal that my wife and I just got in on.

If you've been following my blog very long or looked at my older posts, you might remember that about 2 years ago we joined the century. After a couple of years with T-mobile, I was ready to get out of our contract. We are now with Virgin Mobile (which uses the Sprint Network). Not only that, but we are now part of the real century - that's right, we own Android phones!


One major reason we switched to Virgin - price/cost:
With T-mobile:

  • 2-year contract
  • 700 minutes
  • 400 text messages each (800 between the two phones)
  • $80 a month (ok - $70 but with all the fees and stuff it was a consistent $83)

With Virgin Mobile:

  • No contract. Prepaid phone.
  • 300 minutes each (600 combined)
  • Unlimited texting and data (yes, unlimited data)
  • $50 a month ($25 per phone which is actually like $26.50 with tax)

So we lost some minutes in the deal, but but we are saving $30 a month. The other thing was that we had to buy the phones. We got in on this deal. So that was $400 to get the phones (Christmas gifts), but in 1 year we will have saved $360 ($30 a month over 12 months) and actually a bit more because we are going to disable one of the phones for a few additional months during the summer. So as long as we have our phones for a year, they will pay for themselves. If you interested in the other Virgin plans, here they are:


(yeah, we could have gotten more minutes for the same $80 we were paying for T-mobile)

Oh yeah, and my phone is all setup with my Google Voice number with a flawless integration. So far, loving the phone.

Comments

Bradwich said...

Um, that's a pretty fantastic deal. I hadn't ever given much thought to Virgin before. How's the service?

JC's picture

JC said...

So far its been really good. I haven't had any areas where I can't get coverage (I've been in the city most the time since I got it less than a week ago). They use Sprint network for coverage (from Wikipedia page: On July 28, 2009, Sprint agreed to pay $483 million to purchase Virgin Mobile USA. The Federal Trade Commission later gave the go-ahead on the acquisition.Virgin Mobile USA was originally conceived as a joint venture between Virgin Group and Sprint, and uses Sprint's cellular bandidth in the United States. Sprint retained the Virgin Mobile name after the deal closed.)