There’s a new phone service in town–Ting. And it’s shaping up to be an attractive and affordable alternative to the big four cell phone providers.
I’ve been using Verizon Wireless for as long as I’ve had a cell phone. My latest Verizon phone, the Droid 2, is the first smartphone I’ve ever owned, and I love it. The problem is the service to use it is really expensive. I’m up for an early upgrade in July and was excited to get my hands on the Droid Razr Maxx or the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, but I’ve since reconsidered. After looking into my monthly data usage I found I’m not using nearly what I’m paying for at Verizon. My wife and I share a plan, which costs $145 per month for both phones. That’s 700 minutes of talk time (the lowest available option), unlimited texting (this is basically all we use our phones for), and 2 GB of data for my phone (she doesn’t have a smartphone yet). Last month, my wife and I only used 146 minutes, sent 1,419 texts, and used 695 megabytes of data. We are not getting our money’s worth.
I was recently turned on to Ting, a phone service that opened its doors, so to speak, in February 2012. For starters, there are no contracts with Ting. If I want to make the switch from Verizon, on the other hand, I have to wait another six months until my contract is up in November, unless I pay $700 to break our two phones out of contract. The catch with Ting is users pay full retail price for phones up front–at larger contracted carriers like Verizon you get a discounted price on phones when beginning a two-year contract, which is usually about half off. This is significantly cost effective when considering retail on some phones is upwards of $600 or more. While this may turn some away from Ting initially–phone selection is sparse at the moment, but they offer the Samsung Galaxy SII for $485, which is a very popular and well-made phone–the savings in monthly bills quickly recoup the extra up-front costs. This is because Ting only charges you for what you actually use. You initially customize your plan (XS to XXL, like clothing sizes) based on how many minutes, texts, and data you want per month. For example, the small plan (“S”) is $3 for 100 minutes, $3 for 1oo texts, and $3 for 100 megabytes of data, whereas the XXL plan is $54 for 3,000 minutes, $14 for 6,000 texts, and $60 for 3,000 megabytes of data. Based on my wife’s and my monthly usage, we could get by with the Medium minute plan ($9 for 500 minutes), the Large text plan ($8 for 2,000 texts), and the Large data plan ($24 for 1,000 megabytes of data). Total monthly cost would be $53 per month, including $6 per active phone device. And the kicker is my wife and I would share every bit of the plan, so we could both have smartphones whereas on Verizon we would both have to pay $29.99 per month for 2GB of data. That’s $92 of savings per month, which totals $2,208 of savings when compared with another two-year Verizon contract. Even if my wife and I both got the top-of-the-line phone on Ting (i.e., the Samsung Galaxy SII), it would take us less than 11 months to recoup the up-front costs, and thereafter would have complete savings.
So, our projected monthly bill is $53 per month; however, Ting only charges you for actual use. That means that if you go over your plan you just get bumped up to the next payment tier instead of tacking on expensive overage charges, and if you use less than your selected plan Ting actually credits your next monthly bill with the difference based on the lower tier that your usage actually fell into.
Now let’s tally the pros: monthly savings (check); good phones (check); good customer service (check–according to Ting, you’ll always talk to a real person rather than an automated message or menu system).
Possible cons: Ting runs off the Sprint 3G and 4G WiMAX network. For some, this could be a problem. Sprint is more widely covered on the East Coast, but for someone like myself who lives in the Pacific Northwest and frequents the Hawaiian islands, Sprint coverage is sparse. That said, Sprint and Ting users in my area haven’t reported any problems with coverage, so in the end it may just be up to you: do you want to continue paying out the nose at one of the big four carriers, or do you want to start saving money?
(May is Dump Your Contract Month at Ting, which means they’ll pay your contract cancellation fee if you win a daily drawing. For other ideas to nix your early cancellation fee, check out this article from Lifehacker.)
If you’re a Ting or Sprint user, share your experience in the comments below. Everyone else, let us know your reasons for sticking with your carrier or leaving.
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Two months ago I jumped off the Death Star and I’ll never look back. I’d been looking for a good slider from a no-contract joint, and was biding my time until my sentence with Ma Bell was over, but by then the one I’d found – the HTC Evo Shift – was gone… Then in March I clicked on an ad – something I swore I’d never do, but something made me do it – and found Ting. They had a decent slider, and though I’d been twice bitten by Samsung with crap electronics, I’d read good things about the Transform. So I bought it, and holy crap am I glad I did. With AT&T, I had to stand in a certain spot in my kitchen at a certain angle to make a voice call without it fuzzing out or dropping altogether – even though I’m on a second floor, above everyone else for three blocks, and in DIRECT line of sight to a cell tower. Now I know I live in Alabama, and I have accepted the fact that nothing travels very far or fast here – including but not limited to tolerance, math, decency, science and even light and radio waves, but come on already. Now I can talk anywhere, at any angle – it even works all the way thru the tunnels under the river! Sure, there are dead spots here and there, mostly limited to severely rural areas, but not even Sprint can drag this state kicking and screaming into the 20th century, much less the 21st…
Not to mention I’m paying less than half – this month a quarter, actually, thanks to their sliding billing – what I used to pay the extortionists at Bad Blue. I’m now fully engaged in lobbying my family, friends and co-workers into dropping the Death Star, Big Red and Little Pink – and even the main Ol’ Yeller – to at least look at Ting or one of the other no-contract Sprint remarketers. There is no reason not to.
One of the big reasons I like Ting is that it is Android-ONLY. I hope they stay that way. I’m a big open-source supporter, even though I have serious issues with Google’s missteps on the privacy thing. I hope they never cave to the iPhone, Blackberry or Windows and keep it simple and straightforward.
Thanks for chiming in, JD. That’s awesome that you’ve had such a great experience. I’d be interested to know how your experience has been with Ting’s customer service. I recently called Ting to ask a bunch of questions before switching over from Verizon, and even though the phone only rang twice before it was picked up by a real person, the guy on the other end seemed to know nothing about Ting or its phones. They’re based in Canada so their employees can’t use the Ting service or the phones they offer, which I didn’t find out until after writing the article. Again, I’d be curious to hear how your customer service experience with Ting has been because talking to this particular gentleman was a bit of a turnoff.
I’ve been switched to Ting for a few months now, and it has been really good. Chris, that is too bad about your support call. High quality support is what their company is really about. Tucows is the parent company, and they have brought that focus on customer support through their businesses, like Hover and Ting. I think you may have caught a person who was pretty new, because Ting had only been open a few months, and a lot of things were changing pretty quickly (and growing fast) around that time. Anyway, there were two main things I really like about Ting. 1. We had been sticking with feature phones because I live in wifi all the time and don’t want to pay for a data plan I wouldn’t use. I couldn’t find a carrier that would even let me bring my own smart phone without forcing me to buy data plans. 2. We had a shared family plan. There are some pretty good deals with MVNO providers for a single phone at about $45, but almost none have shared plans, so it stacks up to buying 2 or 3 single plans, which gets expensive. With Ting, your plan is the total amount of usage pooled among however many phones you have on your plan. My daughter and I have our two phones on it, and we fit in the 500 minutes and either 1,000 or 2,000 texts, and mobile data turned off because neither of us care about it since we have access to wifi so much. That comes to $26 or $29, depending on where our texting falls, plus about $4 taxes. It’s hard to beat a shared plan with two phones for $35.