{"id":1000080,"date":"2006-07-05T11:49:41","date_gmt":"2006-07-05T16:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/travel\/2006\/07\/05\/shopping-for-a-prepaid-mobile-plan\/"},"modified":"2006-07-11T07:47:49","modified_gmt":"2006-07-11T12:47:49","slug":"shopping-for-a-prepaid-mobile-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/travel\/2006\/07\/05\/shopping-for-a-prepaid-mobile-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Shopping for a Prepaid Mobile Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a very light cell phone user, except occasionally when I travel. Currently I&#8217;m on the very bottom-of-the-barrel T-Mobile monthly plan that they don&#8217;t even offer any more. Only 60 minutes a month + weekends, and I very rarely even use that. Looking around it seemed I could save quite a bit of money by going to a prepaid plan. That wouldn&#8217;t cost me more than about $100 a year, roughly 20% of what I&#8217;m paying now. I was just going to switch my T-Mobile phone over, but apparently the roaming on their prepaid plans isn&#8217;t so good. <\/p>\n<p>What are people recommending for prepaid phones these days? I need:<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Broad coverage across the USA<\/li>\n<li>Solid local coverage in New York<\/li>\n<li>Low per-minute costs, including outside my local area. $0.10 per minute is good.<\/li>\n<li>Low initial cost. The cheaper the better. (I don&#8217;t want to spend three figures or even in the mid-two figures for a new phone)<\/li>\n<li>International Roaming<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I want<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>International Roaming<\/li>\n<li>An unlocked phone<\/li>\n<li>A triband GSM phone whose SIM card I can swap out in foreign countries<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I do not need:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>To keep my existing mobile number<\/li>\n<li>Cameras, organizers, games, web browsing, etc. on the phone<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Given those criteria, what&#8217;s my best option? Who do you recommend? Who should I avoid?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a very light cell phone user, except occasionally when I travel. Currently I&#8217;m on the very bottom-of-the-barrel T-Mobile monthly plan that they don&#8217;t even offer any more. Only 60 minutes a month + weekends, and I very rarely even use that. Looking around it seemed I could save quite a bit of money by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-1000080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1000080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1000080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1000080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1000080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}