Stupid commercials - but a great phone service!
Written: Sep 27 '01 (Updated Oct 11 '01)
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Pros: tons of minutes per month - long distance from anywhere in the country!
Cons: occasionally in roam
The Bottom Line: The benefit of being able to call long distance from anywhere with no extra fee makes this plan worth it.
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| cloverk's Full Review: Sprint Mobile Phone Service in Columbus |
I decided many months ago that I needed a cell phone to meet my needs. I was driving back and forth to Michigan every other week and every time I hit a storm I would think "If only I had a cell phone!" Then I moved to Dallas to live with my parents and began noticing all the ads on television. The one that caught my attention was Sprint PCS. Not because of the hokey "X-Files" like take on cellular service, but on the phrase "all digital, nationwide long distance." From that phrase I surmised that calling to anywhere in the country would use the same minutes as calling next door. But every time I brought it up with someone they said, "No - that couldn't be it." It just sounded too good - to be able to call to anywhere in the US and each minute would equal a minute. No more seperate long distance and local minutes on your service plan.
One day my dad was reading the paper and saw a Sprint ad. It said they had 2150 night and weekend minutes, and 350 daytime minutes for $39.99. That sounded too good to be true. We got out a calculator. That equaled a couple cents a minute, providing that you used all of them. So I started to look around.
First I got on the Sprint website and tried to figure out the whole "nationwide long distance thing." It looked to me like you could call to anywhere. I told my dad about it and he looked skeptical. So we went to the mall and checked out some other cellular services.
Cingular said that for a fee you could have unlimited nationwide long distance - but you had to be calling from your home area. Voice Stream said they had 2000 weekend minutes per month - but they had to be local, and from your home calling area. Call locally for 500 minutes every weekend? I didn't think that was even worth trying.
By this time I had also decided to move back to Columbus, and I wanted a phone for the trip. Cingular, Voice Stream and AT&T all said they would have to give me a local Dallas number, that I could change free of charge in Columbus. Finally I visited my favorite from the beginning - Sprint. I doubtfully asked, "Can I get a Columbus number now?" "Sure!" was the enthusiastic reply. (By the way - for the rest of the time I was in Dallas - my friends in Columbus could call my phone as a local number.) Then my dad reminded me that I probably could probably only call long distance from Columbus like all the other plans. But that was wrong too. I was informed that I could call from anywhere, to anywhere. "So I could call Indianapolis to Boston, just the same as calling Columbus to Dallas?" I asked. The answer was yes.
I was sold on the plan because there were only the two kinds of minutes - anytime - and night and weekend. Nights started at 8 pm, and weekends were from 8 on Friday to 7 Monday morning. I didn't have to worry about long distance - because in theory if I used all my minutes, they were only costing me a few pennies a minute. Because I planned to use my phone almost exclusively for long distance, I was sold.
The sales girl told me the biggest drawback was that the Sprint digital coverage area will not always cover where you are. It's around large cities, and along major highways, but when you weren't in service, it would go to analog roam. You would continue to have service, but you would be charged 69 cents a minute when calling from roam. Basically you would only want to call in an emergency in these areas. From her speech I was worried that for much of my drive from Dallas to Columbus I would be out of the coverage area. Instead I was only in roam for about 10 minutes of the entire 18 hour drive. I also stopped by my boyfriends school - a town of 30,000 in Indiana, 2 hours from Indianapolis, and I still had service on campus.
My calls are disconnected from time to time, but the clarity of the service is amazing. Most people I talk to don't believe I'm calling from a cell phone (even when I was calling from Dallas to Columbus) and I've been told that it's the clearest phone many of them have ever heard. In fact, because of my experience my father is going out tonight to buy a Sprint plan for himself.
Based on other reviews, it seems that Sprint may have had less coverage and less minutes in the past. But I have 2500 minutes, caller ID, and the ability to check my balance of minutes from my phone, or the internet - along with nationwide long distance and great clarity. Overall I couldn't be happier with Sprint.
Update - I've had this phone for a month now, and in the past few weeks I've begun to experience some problems. First of all, almost all of my calls are disconnected while I'm in my house. The house is in north Columbus, and if I sit out on the front porch I don't have any problems. Inside the house, however, my calls are usually lost within the first minute, and as often as 5 or 6 times in 30 minutes (I talk on the porch now.) Also, when my father bought his phone he received a bonus 500 minutes to call any other Sprint phone, and my mother made a phone call to add these minutes to my phone too so we could share them. A week went by and the minutes hadn't been added. My mother tried calling again and no one answered. The next day she finally got a customer service rep who entered the minutes manually. Apparently he didn't do a great job, because when my father used his phone this morning it said only 50 minutes were added. Mine is correct, but this is still a lot of hassle for a perk they widely advertised.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 39.99
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Epinions.com ID:
cloverk
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Location: So many places - midwest at heart.
Reviews written: 28
Trusted by: 5 members
About Me:
Never eat more than you can lift.
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