Going from contract to pre-paid

My 2 yr contract ends this Nov. I have 2 phones currently sharing the family
plan with almost 3,000 rollover minutes left over. My dilemma is this:

I plan on having my V557's unlocked and use them to go to pre-paid via
Cingular or just go to another service.
Is it possible to ask to keep my current rollover minutes as a loyal
customer when I switch to pre-paid? And how do I go about asking this? That
may prevent me from switching to the other side. TIA


--
marx404

---

› See More: Going from contract to pre-paid

marx404 wrote:
> My 2 yr contract ends this Nov. I have 2 phones currently sharing the family
> plan with almost 3,000 rollover minutes left over. My dilemma is this:
>
> I plan on having my V557's unlocked and use them to go to pre-paid via
> Cingular or just go to another service.
> Is it possible to ask to keep my current rollover minutes as a loyal
> customer when I switch to pre-paid? And how do I go about asking this? That
> may prevent me from switching to the other side. TIA

It certainly won't hurt to ask...but -

Dropping Cingular and going with another carriers negates your "loyal"
customer status.

Asking them to credit your pre-paid account would be about the same thing
as you would no longer be a loyal contractual customer.

No.

--
Copper Emeritus

Golf is not a matter of Life or Death,
it is MUCH more important than that!
"marx404" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> My 2 yr contract ends this Nov. I have 2 phones currently sharing the
> family plan with almost 3,000 rollover minutes left over. My dilemma is
> this:
>
> I plan on having my V557's unlocked and use them to go to pre-paid via
> Cingular or just go to another service.
> Is it possible to ask to keep my current rollover minutes as a loyal
> customer when I switch to pre-paid? And how do I go about asking this?
> That may prevent me from switching to the other side. TIA
>
>
> --
> marx404
>

No harm in asking, but I would say - not gonna happen. You are no longer guaranteed money to the company. There is nothing keeping you from going elsewhere a month down the line.

Actually, here's the scoop. The one thing that will keep me going elsewhere
is that the rest of my family all uses the Cingular family plan. Just my
wife and I will be switching to prepaid as we just got a new car with OnStar
and that covers the usage we need of a car phone. GPS phone beats cellular
hands down albeit more expensive, yet with the savings of combining pre-paid
in lieu of a regular $88. a month bill for a regular 2 year ATT contract,
prepaid cell and Onstar hands free prepaid phone more than fulfills our
purposes at nearly half the cost.

As Cingular Go will allow free mobile to mobile within Cingular and the
remaining family has cing - er- ATT, again money saved and paid minutes
unused, ergo why I have almost 3K rollover minutes. After 4 years of being a
customer would like to see them show some loyalty - even if I switch to
pre-paid and allow me to retain my accrued rollover minutes. I'm sure not
likely, but I shall try anyways.

--
marx404


"whatcity225" <[email protected]> wrote in
message news:[email protected]...
>
> No harm in asking, but I would say - not gonna happen. You are no longer
> guaranteed money to the company. There is nothing keeping you from going
> elsewhere a month down the line.
>
>
> --
> whatcity225
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Posted via Cell Phone Forums: http://cellphoneforums.net
> View this thread:
> http://cellphoneforums.net/alt-cellu...-pre-paid.html
>

At 09 Oct 2007 07:29:55 -0400 marx404 wrote:

> As Cingular Go will allow free mobile to mobile within Cingular


Don't you need to be on the dollar-a-day plan to get free mobile-to-
mobile with Go Phone?

That's $60/month for both you and your wife (assuming you use your
phones at least once per day.) About the same as a contract family
plan, isn't it?

> and the remaining family has cing - er- ATT, again money saved and
> paid minutes unused, ergo why I have almost 3K rollover minutes.
> After 4 years of being a customer would like to see them show some
> loyalty - even if I switch to pre-paid and allow me to retain my
> accrued rollover minutes. I'm sure not
> likely, but I shall try anyways.


Best of luck, but I suspect it isn't going to happen... As an aside,
I never understood the attraction of rollover anyway (except in the
rare case of a user with a wildly varying usage pattern.) In
reality, if you didn't need those 3000 minutes anytime in the last
year, you're not likely to need them in the future either. I left a
thousand or so minutes "on the table" when I left Cingular four years
ago (I moved to Denver, where Cingular didn't offer service at that
time.)


--

"I don't need my cell phone to play video games or take pictures
or double as a Walkie-Talkie; I just need it to work. Thanks for
all the bells and whistles, but I could communicate better with
ACTUAL bells and whistles." -Bill Maher 9/25/2003

What makes you say OnStar is Verizon? So if Onstar is owned by GM, they own
Verizon then? dont think so. OnStar is a GPS based system run by OnStar,
Verizon has interest in them and can provide service but Onstar is NOT
Verizon, they are a GM subsidary. If you can prove that OnStar is Verizon I
would be interested to learn this as fact and repeat it to my GM colleagues.
Besides, thats not what this post is about.


--
marx404


"Elmo P. Shagnasty" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> In article <[email protected]>,
> "marx404" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Just my
>> wife and I will be switching to prepaid as we just got a new car with
>> OnStar
>> and that covers the usage we need of a car phone. GPS phone beats
>> cellular
>> hands down
>
> ummmmmm....it's not "GPS phone". It's not special. It's a Verizon
> phone, now on their digital service.
>

OnStar uses Verizon as well as other services but is not a Verizon phone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnStar

"marx404" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> What makes you say OnStar is Verizon? So if Onstar is owned by GM, they
> own Verizon then? dont think so. OnStar is a GPS based system run by
> OnStar, Verizon has interest in them and can provide service but Onstar is
> NOT Verizon, they are a GM subsidary. If you can prove that OnStar is
> Verizon I would be interested to learn this as fact and repeat it to my GM
> colleagues. Besides, thats not what this post is about.
>
>
> --
> marx404
>
>
> "Elmo P. Shagnasty" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
>> In article <[email protected]>,
>> "marx404" <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> Just my
>>> wife and I will be switching to prepaid as we just got a new car with
>>> OnStar
>>> and that covers the usage we need of a car phone. GPS phone beats
>>> cellular
>>> hands down
>>
>> ummmmmm....it's not "GPS phone". It's not special. It's a Verizon
>> phone, now on their digital service.
>>
>
>

At 10 Oct 2007 07:32:27 -0400 marx404 wrote:
> What makes you say OnStar is Verizon?


Because it uses Verizon service. I don't think Elmo's point was that
Verizon "owned" OnStar or vice Versa- he was referring to YOUR
statement "GPS phone beats cellular hands down"- Elmo's point is that
the OnStar phone IS a cellular phone, connected to the cellular
network, and stops working if you leave the cell network, just like
any other cell phone. Your statement that it "beats" cellular
implied that you believed the OnStar system wasn't cellular-based,
but "GPS" based.

> So if Onstar is owned by GM, they own
> Verizon then? dont think so. OnStar is a GPS based system run by
OnStar,

Again, the service isn't "GPS based." It's a plain-old CDMA
cellular. It has a GPS attached for tracking your location, but so
does virtually every cellphone in use today (for E911 requirements.)



--

"I don't need my cell phone to play video games or take pictures
or double as a Walkie-Talkie; I just need it to work. Thanks for
all the bells and whistles, but I could communicate better with
ACTUAL bells and whistles." -Bill Maher 9/25/2003

marx404 wrote:
> What makes you say OnStar is Verizon? So if Onstar is owned by GM, they own
> Verizon then? dont think so. OnStar is a GPS based system run by OnStar,
> Verizon has interest in them and can provide service but Onstar is NOT
> Verizon, they are a GM subsidary. If you can prove that OnStar is Verizon I
> would be interested to learn this as fact and repeat it to my GM colleagues.
> Besides, thats not what this post is about.
>
>
AFAIK (and I've been using GPS since it was in it's testing phase and
not available to civilians) the only people that can uplink to a GPS
satellite is da' dad gum Gubmint. They do that to upload software, synch
it's clock, maybe do some maintenance if it wobbles, but that's about it.

Onstar doesn't use a satellite phone. Satellite phone service is
available, but the last I heard it was a $10 a minute? Something like
that. Inmarsat was available when I was at sea 15 years ago, but I never
used it. I never had anything that important to say.

If you are going to prepaid, which is what I use, you should check out
this page:
http://www.cellguru.net/prepaid_compare.htm

I use 7-Eleven GSM. Others use PagePlus. Both are good deals if you
don't talk much.

marx404 wrote:
> Actually, here's the scoop. The one thing that will keep me going elsewhere
> is that the rest of my family all uses the Cingular family plan. Just my
> wife and I will be switching to prepaid as we just got a new car with OnStar
> and that covers the usage we need of a car phone. GPS phone beats cellular
> hands down albeit more expensive, yet with the savings of combining pre-paid
> in lieu of a regular $88. a month bill for a regular 2 year ATT contract,
> prepaid cell and Onstar hands free prepaid phone more than fulfills our
> purposes at nearly half the cost.
>
> As Cingular Go will allow free mobile to mobile within Cingular and the
> remaining family has cing - er- ATT, again money saved and paid minutes
> unused, ergo why I have almost 3K rollover minutes. After 4 years of being a
> customer would like to see them show some loyalty - even if I switch to
> pre-paid and allow me to retain my accrued rollover minutes. I'm sure not
> likely, but I shall try anyways.
>

The biggest problem with On-Star is that the newer cars apparently are
digital only. The older On-Star system used the AMPS network, which
provided very wide coverage. The newer systems are CDMA-only, which
limits you coverage considerably, though it's still much better than
GSM-only.

Even when carriers are _permitted_ to turn off their AMPS coverage in
2008, there will still be a great deal of AMPS-only coverage in rural
areas, the areas where you probably are most likely to want coverage.

So what you should do is to get a tri-mode CDMA/AMPS phone on PagePlus
prepaid to augment your in-car On-Star phone. Forget about AT&T Wireless
for prepaid, as they have a poor deal.

You will probably want to drop On-Star after the initial first year that
is included, as it's not a good deal unless you're perpetually locking
your keys in the car.