cheap prepaid plans that use AT&T

[Donald]

Are any of the cheap cell phone plans sold at places like Family Dollar, etc using AT&T? I need a basic cell phone to supplement my T-Mobile smartphone.

I believe AT&T is the only carrier where there is a chance of it working around town where I live.

 

[redhat]

Hmm... I believe the dollar stores do sell the prepaid phones. We just got my Grandma an AT&T Prepaid phone. We did the 10 cent a minute plan and put $100 on there. So it comes out to a year worth of active service with 1000 minutes.

 

[2009Edge]

I have a T-Mobile phone and an ATT phone (wife's). Both are pre-paid. We buy minutes annually ($100.00) online at a discount of 10%. By doing it annually any unused minutes carry over. Any thing less than annually the unused minutes will not carry over. We have been dong this for about 4 years and have not had any problems.

 

[bubbatime]

Straight Talk wireless sold at Wal-Mart stores uses ATT and Verizon towers.

 

[redhat]

Also, Net10 and TracFone run on AT&T sometimes. Here's a great article that shows you how to get the network you want.

http://www.prepaidphonenews.com/2011/12/how-to-get-tracfone-net10-or-straight.html

 

[Triple_Se7en]

Being the topic is plans and not cellphones, Straight Talk might be the plan to question at Walmart.

 

[Donald]

How about Net10. They say they partner with 4 of the top carriers. Since I assume they all need to be the same technology (GSM) it must be AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint? and ??

Verizon is CDMA.

 

[Bill in Utah]

Originally Posted By: bubbatime
Straight Talk wireless sold at Wal-Mart stores uses ATT and Verizon towers.

They actually use Sprint, ATT, T-Mobile and Verizon depending on which phone you get.

If you bring your own phone its T-Mobile since AT&T does not allow Straight Talk to sell their SIMs any more.

Go to NET10 if you want AT&T. $50 per month for unlimited everything but data. Its 1.5gig per month.

Bill

 

[supton]

Been a while, but if you're interested in ST or Tracphone do look online, and enter in your zip. I believe ST uses both AT&T towers and non-AT&T towers. I have to be careful in what I buy, as it's only CDMA at home, no GSM coverage at all--and the first Tracphone I bought was GSM... oops. [CDMA has lousy coverage so I just lived with it for a couple of years.]

Wife did Page Plus and is quite happy with it. She uses her old Verizon phone, as she liked the model. But neither of use our cells very much, so we're lousy datapoints.

 

[gregk24]

Go with Tracfone...ATT's prepaid plans can not compete. I had ATT for a while and you have to add money every month, tracfone does not require that plus tracfone triples your minutes. I had tracfone for years and just got my first smartphone with Tmobile. Only 30 a month for unlimited web and text.

 

[Donald]

Originally Posted By: gregk24
Go with Tracfone...ATT's prepaid plans can not compete. I had ATT for a while and you have to add money every month, tracfone does not require that plus tracfone triples your minutes. I had tracfone for years and just got my first smartphone with Tmobile. Only 30 a month for unlimited web and text.


Net10 is a subsidiary of Tracfone. Not sure if that makes them better or worse or cheaper or more expensive.

 

[Donald]

OK, I went to Family Dollar and got a $7.00 Tracfone Samsung S125G phone. And a bunch of minutes for $19.95 that last 90 days.

Like Jason Bourne in the movies, I have a throw-away phone.

Sitting in my 2nd floor bedroom, it gets then looses service. So better than Verizon or T-Mobile but not perfect.

What carriers do they use? If they use T-Mobile & AT&T cell towers would they use whichever they could get to or maybe AT&T in this county and T-Mobile in the next?

 

[Donald]

Would a better quality phone get better cell service on TracFone. I just need it a tad better.

I thought I was a big spender spending $7.00 + tax.

 

[Donald]

I am reading over the info on the TracFone. Can one just get a SIM card from them and use your own smartphone? Their air time cards you buy do not seem to mention how many GB of data?

Also their coverage map in the brochure has a GSM map and a CDMA map. Not sure what to make of that. Can my $7.00 Tracfone access both networks?

 

[Donald]

It looks like Tracfone does not really do data plans. Net10 is a subsidiary of Tracfone and has smart phones and data plans.

 

[Y_K]

howardforums will answer all your questions better. Also, how to figure out by code which tracfone set uses this or that particular network

 

[Donald]

I am now using Consumer Cellular which exclusively uses AT&T via my Motorola Droid 2 Global.