Double Blind

I’ve had my cell phone (a simple Virgin Mobile Nokia model with no fancy features) since last September and I’m quite happy with how it turned out. Since then I have used $80 of airtime ($60 of which I explicitly paid for), the majority of which was used for the election. So far that has worked out to approximately $11/month which is nearly 3 times better than I could have done with any other normal monthly package. Over time I expect that number to actually decrease as my run-rate after the election was about 5 bucks a month. The cheapest thing I could find over at Fido would have cost $35.45/month if you wanted voice mail and call display, not to mention that you had to sign up for a 2-year contract.

I particularly like the fact that you can switch to a pricing regime which suits the amount of activity that you plan on using your phone with. Since I don’t use the phone too much, I use the basic 25 cents per minute system, but back during October and November for the election I switched to the 10 cents per minute (which cost 40 cents per day) and that reduced net costs considerably (break-even would be greater than 2 minutes a day).

The free voice mail and caller display help extremely. I usually bump anybody I don’t recognize (which more often than not turned out to be wrong numbers, perhaps people looking for meth) to voice mail – if it’s that important than they usually leave a message. This way the phone also acts as a glorified pager for the cost of $45/year which I find to be very reasonable.

This only works because I don’t use my phone very often – I estimate I would have to use about 200 minutes a month airtime before I’d have to seriously start shopping around for a monthly package. I’m not remotely close to that right now. My requirements may shift in the future, but right now I’m rather pleased with the solution since it works and is cheap. I wonder if Virgin will try to screw it up for customers like me by jacking up rates or reducing the maximum time before you have to top up the phone balance.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.