Well, it has been three years since I have invested in a family plan with Voice Stream. I bought five phones for the whole family, supposedly for one low price a month...that is unless you go over the alloted minutes. This is one of many problems with this particular service, that is why I intend to switch...but not before telling the public why you shouldnt buy into Voicestream if you live in the New York Area and possibly elsewhere.

The Family Plan
Within this "family" plan, I was basically given about 2000 minutes on weekdays and around 1000 monthly on weekdays, monthly. This may appear to be a TON of minutes, but remember, you are sharing these minutes with five other members of your family...they will go quick. So lets just say, to give Voicestream the benefit of the doubt...which I will only do once in this whole review...that if you stay within the minutes provided for you, you will not pay alot to use this service, and you will have pleased 5 people, to an extent.

So what if I go over the alloted minutes? How much will I have to pay for each call? If you go over the minutes alotted to you, each LOCAL call costed me about, on average, one-dollar per minute. Each LONG DISTANCEcall will cost about three-dollars per minute, maybe even alittle more.

Now, your probably asking, When do I know if my total minutes alotted in a month are going to run out completely? The answer is...you dont. Without warning, you will be charged by the minute if you happen to go over the monthly minutes alotted to you. Since my family uses cell phone avidly to communitcate with each other and family members across the US frequently, these minutes run out close to a week before the month is out. This leaves us one week of paying, per minute for calls because we have no indication that our minutes have run out.

What does voicestream consider a minute? You would think that a minute would be 60 seconds, well this isnt the case. Voicestream seems to operate like one of those psychic friends phone networks. Each connected call (A connection usually taking 5 seconds, 10 seconds at most) equals one full minute in the minds of Voicestream representatives. This means that if you call a friend, and are on the phone for six minutes, a connection fee of one minute is automatically added to that, making the call now seven minutes in length. You are not told about this when buying into this service! Last month, our family went over our alotted minutes and the phone bill equaled close to 150 dollars! Frankly, we only went over by, what we think was, 40 minutes!

One more case scenerio that we encountered with this plan was that we were being charged minutes for long distance calls that we never ever made! This includes calls to Cuba, the dominican republic and British columbia??!! Total minutes wasted on these unmade calls equalled about thirty of our minutes! It could and most likely will happen to you.

The only plus about any Voicestream plan is the FREE 24 hour 411. You can call at any hour of the night or day to look up a number, and a voicestream representative will always find it for you and connect you free of extra 411 charges that you would have to pay over a regular LAN line. You are however still using your minutes to call 411.

The Service/Quality
In all of the three years I have had Voicestream, the service has always been terrible. I get service virtually nowhere, this includes my own home, 3 miles east, west, south and north of my home. When I do get service around town it is usually a bar or two out of a possible four or five bars! The only locations so far where I have gotten full service include, some small patches along I-95, the center of Times Square, Six Flags New England/New Jersey, and throughout Disney World down in Orlando, Florida. Service is limited folks.

With Voicestream I usually have half of the available service. So now the question is, How is the quality the average phone call? While talking on the phone, whomever you are talking to will fade in and out, you will fade in and out, you will hear static, and eventually you will be completely disconnected. This usually isnt good when making important phone calls to businesses when you are on the go, and its a major annoyance to any person that you are calling.

My girlfriend happens to live far enough away to be considered long distance, so whenever I make calls to her, I usually use my cellphone. Let me tell you, she has had it with my service. She has threatened to throw my phone out the window, call voicestream herself and complain, or lunges at me whenever she vists. When we first started dating, she would think that I just hung up on her, and would, of course, get angry because it would happen at least twice in a thirty minute conversation. She has now gotten used to voicestream suddenly disconnecting us from each other, but this isnt to say that its not annoying.

There is nothing at all good about the service/quality of Voicestream in this area. It should go reconfigure its towers of something, because i've talked to various friends who also own voicestream and even they admitt that you dont get service, at all, ANYWHERE!

What else can you be charged for unknowingly?

Simply put, Voicemail. Voicestreams has a voicemail service that you can access by pressing *123, and entering a password. Each time that you dial *123 to access it, you are charged one-minute and however long it takes to check the messages that people leave you. And if someone leaves you a message, even if is unchecked, however long the message is in minutes, is the amount of minutes taken away from the monthly time alotted.

Summation

Voicestream just didn't cut it for me, and I recently dropped the service, and i'm looking for another, possibly cingular wireless. I just could not put up with all of the money it has cost me to own this plan and the terrible experiences i have had making cellular calls with it. Trust me when I say that investing in a plan with voicestream will only lead to heartache and possibly a loss in alot of well earned money.




Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 40.99