Archive

Posts Tagged ‘cell phone’

Boost Mobile Unlimited

February 9th, 2010 1 comment

The entire cell phone industry is wrong and Boost Mobile intends to fix it.  Do you hate your contract?  Do you hate the fact that if you want to cancel early because your carrier is giving you bad service that you can’t?  Do you hate those early termination fees?  If you answered any of these questions is yes then you probably should be looking at a less traditional phone company.  You probably should be looking at Boost Mobile and the Boost Mobile Unlimited plan.

Boost Mobile is a prepaid cell phone company, which really just means that they let you prepay for your service instead of paying for the service after the fact.  Most cell phone companies want you to pay after each month because then they get to charge you based on your usage.  If you go over your minutes what are you going to, do not pay for them?

Of course not.

Cell phone companies completely understand the consumer mindset of well, if I go over a little with just one month and so they can overcharge you, by quite a lot. Boost Mobile and other prepaid phone companies have a very different way of looking at the customer relationship. Boost Mobile wants to actually make you happy as their customer.

You see, a happy customer is a paying customer, and in the business that Boost Mobile is in, they are only going to be able to keep you as a customer if they can keep you happy.  If you don’t like the service that they are providing.  You can switch any time, which puts a premium on their ability to deliver quality service.  Personally, I’ve always thought that phone companies are able to take a damage of their customers as they make it so hard and so expensive to be able to switch providers.

Have you ratchet tried to switch phone companies?  It doesn’t seem so bad until you start looking at the early termination fee on your two or three year contract.  Oh wait, does any other member of your family have a phone with that company, while the net means that they have a separate contract with a separate timelines and expiration date on it.  Thus, if you want to switch.  Its going to cost you the early termination fee, multiplied by the total number of lines that you have with the company.

Yup, that means that you are stuck with that company until your contract runs out in less you are willing to pay.  The very expensive, early termination fee is a way to keep you as a customer.  Whether you like it or not.  What kind of business models that?

As a customer, I want a phone company that is worn to provide me quality phone service at a reasonable price, that isn’t going to make me mad.  That doesn’t sound by any means unreasonable to me, and apparently it doesn’t sound unreasonable to Boost Mobile.

See, Boost Mobile has created a whole new kind of prepay plan, which I’m extremely excited to try at some point. What they have done is they say that you can have an entire Unlimited phone use package for $50 a month. That’s it. Unlimited talk, unlimited text, unlimited internet for only $50 a month.

If you are a Blackberry user, they have a similar plan for $60 per month.  When you compare that to other phone companies you would probably end up spending more like $100-150 per month for the exact same service.  Did I mention that the cost is per phone? If you have more than one phone that uses unlimited texting or Interne, it’s going to cost you a truckload of money that other cell phone companies.

That’s one so excited about this new movement in the telecom industry.  Even though progress is slow, it seems like these companies are finally starting to realize that they can’t treat their customers like ATM machines.  Slowly but surely customers are getting the idea that they can’t just put up with their phone company, doing whatever they want and think that it’s okay.  It’s very much not okay.

What people really need to do is they need to take a stand and say that they’re no longer going to put up with these ridiculous to win three year contracts to everyone seems to think is an absolute requirement to have a basic cell phone service.  People need to stop being willing to pay $.10 or $.20 per tax.  Or perhaps a flat 20 or $30 a month just to send basic text messages on their phones.  If I told you how much that is costing you per kilobyte or megabyte or gigabyte versus what it actually costs them to send it you would throw a fit.

No, the future of phones is not in long contracts and expensive plans.  In a few years almost everyone’s phone will simply be an Internet communication device that all calls and video and web browsing is all just sent through the Internet.  This and that would mean that you only have to pay one low monthly fee to get all your services, and you wouldn’t be charged separately for Internet or voice or texting.  For that matter, we shouldn’t be charged separately for each of those services as it is right now.

Unfortunately, that wonderful future is not yet reality.  Cell phone companies are still taking horrible advantage managing their customers and the FCC seems to be willing to let this go for the most part.

So, until we get to the point where we have just one flat rate for all communications, the best we can do is to support services like Boost Mobile. It’s a reasonable $50 per month, which is probably less than you are paying right now.  As far as I can tell, the Boost Mobile Unlimited plan is the best deal I can find for cell phone service in the market. The only real competitors on price and service are the other prepaid companies. Even still, Boost Mobile is backed by the Sprint network, so it’s hard to beat both the price and the service.