Choosing a Cell Phone Provider

For years the only decision to make in reference to a telephone provider was between the behemoths of the industry "Ma Bell", or eventually, AT&T and ... well ... nobody. You had little choice to choose a carrier for your phone service, but then again, what was the difference going to be in a home phone service anyways? As we fast forward to the present time we are constantly being bombarded with different cell phone carriers and their various arguments or tag lines to give us the best service available. So how do you tell them apart? Here are a few suggestions:

Ø Consider what type of in-network or family type calling plans are available to you by the company that you are considering for your cell phone service. Do you get free time to talk to anyone within the network or just a small group that you designate? Inside of that, just how big is the network that you can make free calls to? Are we talking about a network of several tens of millions or a network slightly larger than your last family reunion?

Ø Does your cell phone carrier offer a plan in which you can prepay for a month and not go over so as to give you a little control over your budget? These "pay as you go" or "on demand" services can be a great benefit to those struggling to budget from month-to-month. If you don't want to pay a penny over this or a dime over that, then set up your monthly budget allocation and don't pay over it.

Ø What types of bonuses does the cell phone carrier offer to its subscribers in the form of multimedia downloads or games to play just for fun? Are you able to download straight from your phone or do you have to go to a website and send the file to your computer? Are the files just audio or video files or can you actually access the web and make purchases?

Ø Get online and make a running tab of the positives and negatives that you read online in message boards and forums about each service. Everybody is bound to have a few bad ones as you can't please everybody, but see if everybody has the same problems or certain problems are isolated. The more isolated the problem then the less likely it will happen to you and you probably have invested in a good cell phone provider.

The cell phone providers of today do not mirror the landline phones of yesteryear, no; cell phones and cell phone providers are all about the little guy. The underdog is the favorite in this game!