Verizon Wireless Vs. Sprint

My work provides me with a Blackberry, and all of the services that come with it. I get a phone, email, text messaging and Internet access. It is wonderful because I don't have to foot the bill. For my wife, however, this is a source of envy for her. For her phone, which we had through Verizon Wireless, was just that, a phone. we don't pay for additional text messaging or any of the other services. The big thing that she misses out on is the text messaging. Her friends will send her a text, and she'll call them back since it runs us about .20 cents per text message. Is this a rip off or what?

So, this holiday season, I decided that I would look into upgrading her account to include text messaging. I figured that I was still under contract with Verizon Wireless and that I would just log in to the online account, choose to upgrade the service to include unlimited text messaging and be done. A couple of things happened then.

1) I found out that we weren't under contract any more and we were just working month to month.

2) I looked at Verizon's pricing for text messaging and it went something like this:

- For $5.00/month - I could add 250 text messages

- For $10.00/month - I could add unlimited messaging to Verizon customers, and 500 messages to other providers.

- For $15.00/month - Unlimited to Verizon customers, and 1500 messages to other providers

- For $20/month - Unlimited to Verizon customers, and 5000 additional messages to other providers.

This scared me a bit. While we do know some people who are on the verizon plan, most of our friends/family are not. Even if they were, it seems that people are changing cell providers all of the time. Verizon didn't offer an option to just be completely unlimited with text messages. This surprised me because charging for text messages is nearly all profit. You would think at some point they would give you unlimited. Even if they did, however, given the prices above, it would be more than $20/month to add on this service, which was more than I was hoping to pay. I don't like the idea of a limited plan because I would constantly worry about her going over the allotted number of text messages and then having to pay the outragous per message fee. So, since we were no longer under contract, it was time for me to start looking at other providers.

In came Sprint. Sprint now offers the "Everything" series of plans. It starts at the top with the Simply Everything plan which includes all services with an unlimited allocation. While I really like the idea of this, it is $100.00/month which was way more than we need to be paying. Plus, since my wife is really only interested in the text messaging, it was overkill. Going through the list of offerings, I came across the Everything Messaging plan. This plan offers an allocated number of phone talking minutes and unlimited text messaging to any provider. SCORE!!! Now for the price...it is $50.00/month for 450 minutes or $70.00 for 900 minutes. The 450 minute plan is nearly identical to the service that we currently have with Verizon, so I was very interested. Overall, it was just $10.00 more than what we currently pay with Verizon. So, I was getting the same phone service and unlimited (truly unlimited) messaging for just an additional $10.00. This is almost a no brainer.

I did some reading and asking around the office for other folks that used Sprint. Those that use it were happy with the service and have had it for several years. So, then I decided to talk to the sales/customer service area and ask them some questions. This part sucked! I tried the web sales (where you just chat like instant messager with the sales dept.). The staff was simply there to sign people up. They weren't equipped with the information to answer any questions. I got the canned response "We don't have that information available to us in Web Sales" from them several times. I even got quite frustrated when I spoke with one individual about the additional fees and service charges. She insisted that there was no way to determine what types of fees I would be charged until I signed up and was billed. I ended up calling Sprint up on the phone and spoke with a representative. This was a much better conversation. They had information and answers...it was great. I ended up signing up with her right then. She waived the shipping fees and the startup fees. She got me a phone with a full keyboard for free and when it was all said and done, I didn't pay for anything upfront.

Since it isn't quite Christmas yet, we haven't started using the phone. We'll have to go through the process of "porting" the old number from Verizon to the Sprint phone. I'm not really looking forward to that, but we'll get through it. I am excited about this change in providers and I hope that it works out for the best.