September 24, 2012 was a big day for me. It was the day that I pulled the pin on my “prepaid saving plan” that offered me that “unlimited voice, text and data” for something better. It was time for me to move to a plan that actually paid me back for telling my friends and family about it. For years, I’ve been recommending plans and phones to friends and getting a 1% kickback or a one-time $10 payment for signing up a new user. I was more interested in helping friends save or get a better deal than I was about making money with it, but making a bit of money was nice.
At the time I had been out of contract for 9 months and bounced from carrier to carrier looking for the best coverage at the best prices. I originally left my Sprint plan for the better coverage and lower prices of T-Mobile’s Monthly4G plan, but the data caps were too low. I then tried Red Pocket Mobile A but they removed their 2GB plan in favor of a $5 savings and a drop to 1GB. Again, the data limit was just a bit too low for my needs. I then moved to Net10 and their $50 a month unlimited everything plan on AT&T as well. What I found was data speeds that were half my T-Mobile speeds at best and the irritation of dealing with poor service and online chat to solve problems. Finally, in Spetember I made the choice to give Solavei a try.
Solavei seemed way too good to be true. The website offered unlimited talk, text and 4GB of 4G data for $49. Sure, you have to add your post paid cellular taxes to this total, which makes mine closer to $60 a month, but that was the same price that I was paying for 2GB on Red Pocket Mobile and that didn’t include unlimited 2G data after reaching that 2GB cap! That said, who knew what kind of coverage Solavei was going to give me or what kind of data speeds I would see running on their “4G” network.
The first thing everyone needs to know is that I am a Windows Phone guy. It’s fast, easy and it works. I love the tiles and the configurability of the handsets. That said, at the time I joined Solavei, I had a Nokia Lumia 900 locked to AT&T and an HTC Titan unlocked for use on any network. I desperately wanted to have my Lumia on Solavei, but AT&T said I couldn’t get the unlock code until December. With that information, I started to use Solavei with my Titan and fell in love. I knew the radio wasn’t an HSPA+42 radio, so my data speeds would suffer a bit, but I was still able to pull about 5 Mbps down and send at 1.5 Mbps. More than adequate compared to my 3 Mbps down on Net10 and Red Pocket. Voice and text were just as solid as well.
I then decided to upgrade my handset to the Nokia Lumia 810, the highest level T-Mobile Lumia that was available. I have been using my Lumia 810 on Solavei since January and it is the best combination of service and device that I have ever used. Considering I was in device testing for AT&T back before they merged with Cingular, I have used some pretty amazing devices and networks over the past 15 years, so that is a pretty big statement. Solavei solved my communications needs with a minimal cost.
Let me cover what I had gone through a bit more in-depth with services…
My first carrier was AT&T Wireless, who I tested phones for. I never had a bill and just used my phone whenever or however I wanted. We were some of the first pioneers using EDGE phones as tethered connections to our laptops and I was even one of the first people to place MP3 ringtones on my devices. After a while though, the testing program when to an in-house system and our vendor accounts were slowly phased out. It was time to shop for a real plan with a real bill.
Verizon Wireless was the next carrier that I experienced. I actually did something crazy the first time I was in a cell store. I just signed on the dotted line and traded my AT&T testing phone for, “Anything I wanted in the whole store.” The store manager at the location was so impressed with the phone I was carrying, he wanted to get it to his manager to see. So, I was given a beautiful “Smartphone” and an LG VX7000 that I could blue tooth tether to my Dell Axim pocket PC. There were no limits on my plan and the $95 a month bill wasn’t all that terrible considering this was still the age of “per minute plans” which could run $100’s each month.
From that $95 bill, I added my wife to be to my plan, then we took out $50 business line and added it to the family plan for another $10 a month. Verizon continued to win my business by offering me free phones when I needed replacements, not just every 24 months, and continuing to perform well. Unfortunately, by the time I left Verizon, my bill had skyrocketed from $95 to over $250 a month for the three lines.
We then started shopping for a savings plan with the other major carriers and found ourselves in a Sprint store. Sprint offered us a 28% discount for our “business line” and let us add our two personal lines to the program as well. We decided to take two of the lines to Sprint and change our small business number to a Google Voice number. We ended up with two of the ‘best’ Android powered phones that Sprint had available and a $95 a month bill. That was quite a savings over our $250 that we were paying Verizon.
That’s where the fun with Sprint ended though. The phones they sold us were garbage and everyone that had one, knew it. The Samsung Moment, with its GPS issues, connectivity problems and other quirks that made the phone unusable at times frustrated me to the point of wanting to terminate my service. Of course, then we discovered rooting, custom ROM’s and fixing the phone myself. We survived long enough with the Moments for me to start recommending service to everyone that I met up with. After sending 30 lines to Sprint, I got a call from my sales person asking if I would like to have an HTC Evo 4G. I took the EVO 4G,
I enjoyed the Evo 4G so much, I purchased one for my wife as soon as we had an upgrade available. What wasn’t so fun was watching our bill get fee after fee added to it. First my Evo added a $10 premium data charge. That took our bill to $110 a month. Then they dropped the discount on the 2nd line, which took the bill to $125 a month. Then they added the $10 premium fee to my wife’s line for her Evo. Finally our bill climbed to $155. My contract was now up and even though my wife’s was not, we decided that we would rather try something that was lower cost again and we started to shop.
I started doing more research and discovered that where we moved, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint all had coverage issues so we tried to price out AT&T service. The astronomical price of $190 a month for 2 lines came out and we started looking at things like the GoPhone and other MVNO’s. I tried to be proactive and switched to a $30 100 minute, unlimited text and data plan on T-Mobile. It was fine when I used the free Samsung Exhibit II 4G phone that T-Mobile was nice enough to send me, but with the limited minutes, I had to use Google Voice over WiFi too much and there were many places where there was no data coverage. The $30 bill was great, but not having enough minutes became a liability.
Shortly after that, my wife decided she wanted out of Sprint due to the poor coverage We still heard nothing but great things about AT&T in our area, so we settled on Red Pocket Mobile. Their $60 a month per line fee matched the performance of AT&T’s $190 plan and didn’t have the risks of any overages. It was quite the deal. So we found a few good used phones online and sold our Sprint Evo’s to break even. I stayed with RPM until they cut their data plans from 2GB down to 1GB per month. They did cut the price $5 a month, but it wasn’t enough for me to feel comfortable with, so I moved my line to Net10. Net10 offered unlimited data, but they placed so many limitations on what you could or couldn’t do with the device that it made me nervous. So I began searching again.
Finally, we get back to Solavei and how it seemed too good to be true. A plan that offered $49 unlimited talk, text and data. A plan that was straight forward about offering 4GB of 4G data before you were slowed. A plan that didn’t use refill cards or crazy payment systems to ‘recharge’ your phone each month. It was a carrier, that wasn’t a carrier.Then, to top it all off, instead of just getting a $5 credit or a free accessory if I referred someone to Solavei, I would get PAID? This was truly amazing.
So, that brings us all the way forward to today. Right now, I am being paid by my cellular company each month for the people that I help save money by telling them about Solavei. Writing this blog, lets me help even more people save – whether they sign up through me or someone else. Not only am I helping people save, but some are even earning. It’s the best of both worlds and I couldn’t be happier helping others. So, get in and get social! Start saving, earning or just using Solavei today and you can see what a difference it makes in your life. It made one in mine.
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