AT-T wireless service - PagePlus, the Prepaid Service Few People Know About even though they

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PagePlus, the Prepaid Service Few People Know About even though they

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2007-09-23, 10:33 pm

Today I was doing the den meeting for my son's Cub Scout den, and part
of the program was about family budgeting and reducing recurring monthly
expenditures.

Besides the parent's suggestions of saving electricity by eliminating
all video games, and the scouts suggestion of cutting showers back to
once a month to save water and natural gas, one of the topics was saving
money on items like internet access, long distance, and cellular.

I mentioned that I paid only about $2.50/month each for cell phone
service for my kid's phones, and after the meeting I was surrounded by
parents wanting to know how to sign up.

PagePlus must be about the worst in terms of getting the word out about
their service. They'll be getting about six new accounts in the next
week thanks to me. Since Verizon is the predominant carrier in my area,
almost everyone at the meeting had at least one spare Verizon phone to
use (though the kids of course want a fancy camera phone--tough luck!).

I had to go into explaining how to sign up (having to buy activation on
eBay is kind of strange), and which phones to use (any phone that was
ever on Verizon CDMA), and explain the rollover, the re-upping every
four months, etc. All these parents were thinking of prepaid in terms of
the horrible deals with high minimums from Verizon, AT&T, Virgin,
Tracfone, Net10, etc. (T-Mobile doesn't work in my area, so they are not
a consideration).

PagePlus costs:
--------------
$76/1400 minutes = 5.4¢/min
$47.50/700 minutes = 6.8¢/min
$10/83 minutes = 12¢/min

Add a minimum of $10 every 4 months to keep account active and roll-over
existing minutes. 50¢/month service charge.

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