Standard Mischief

Since I gave such a ringing endorsement of TracFone yesterday;

It?s the ideal service for identity thieves, paranoid people, undocumented workers, teenagers without credit, people who have a little action going on the side, and people like me who hate talking on the phone but need to be accessible.

(sorry, sometimes I like to hear myself blog), I though I’d go over a few advantages and pitfalls.

Bad crap:

All of the tech support is by people on the third shift in India. Their English varies from pretty good to hard to understand. You’ll need tech support if you need your voicemail reset because you forgot your password, or if you want to move your minutes from your old TMDA phone to your new GMS phone. You can pretty much redeem airtime and handle your voicemail and other day by day stuff by yourself if you are at all technically inclined.

If you lose the phone, you are pretty much SOL. The tech support doesn’t really know how many minutes you have left, that’s handled by the firmware. I would suggest signing up via the web with fake info rather than no info. I imagine then you could get access to your phone number and have it transferred to your new phone, but you likely will lose a large stockpile of minutes.

TracFone will spam you. I highly suggest setting up an email just for the phone. Go get a yahoo account or something. Keep note of who’s name is on the phone’s account. I think Karl Marx of 308 Maple Way set up my account.

TracFone will instant message you. They either stopped because I called and wasted operator time bitching at them, or they figured out that any more than 3 instant messages is really annoying, and bad for business.

Good crap:

TracFone buys service from major cellphone networks. My old TMDA phone got the service from AT&T or Verizon, I forget. My GMS phone gets service from Cingular. I get the same coverage as anyone else with Cingular, and my voicemail works just like Cingular’s too.

The Email to SMS gateway is also Cingular. The email address for my phone is something like myphonenumber@mobile.mycingular.com. I’m pretty sure that TracFone never told me that, it was fairly easy to figure out.

Incoming SMS are free. Script kiddies and shell script authors can have fun with this. You can get the weather texted to you every day at 8 am, or have a message sent to you whenever your garage door opener opens, just as long as you are geeky enough to wire things up and write the shell scripts. Everything everyone figured out already back in 1986 when you got your first pager.

Outgoing text messages cost three tenths of a credit. That’s about 12 cents each, worst case. Best case is about three cents or so. If there’s ever an emergency like 9/11 and all the cellphones can’t make outgoing calls, frequently a text message can get through. Because your loved ones might be on another network, you need to get their email gateways now to use in an emergency.

Other stuff to keep in mind:

Upon activation, you get a number of units, and a date. Either run out of time or run out of credits and the phone is only good for 911 calls, Each card you redeem will add two months to the end date unless it’s a year card. They’ll also only let you get a few months ahead on the date department, unless you buy a year card, then it’s something like two years.

Update 18Aug06: From the website:

Add airtime before your due date and your remaining minutes and service days will carryover and be added to your phone, to a maximun of 120 days with any combination of regular airtime cards or 730 days with any combination of annual plan cards

If you run out the date clock, you lose your phone number. Fail to reactivate your phone again with in a few days and you lose all your credits too.

Redeeming a card consists of keying in a crapload of numbers 2 or three times, one after another. That once a year hassle card looks better and better.

You will want to check you email before redeeming a card. Sometimes you can get a bonus minutes that way. Redeem a year card, and use promotional code 54220 for an extra 200 credits/minutes. Code 54604 should work with any type card until the end of August, 2006.

Update 18Aug06: There’s always a code you can use to get bonus minutes when you redeem a card. If you don’t get the codes via email just google for them. The search terms tracfone 10000..99999 expires seem to work well for me.

Very occasionally you will get into a roam area. When this happens, local and long distance calls cost 2 credits a minute. This only happens to me up near Harper’s Ferry, WV up near the woods, but it might be an issue if you move to Wyoming.

You can buy a lot of minutes for the $30+tax/month that even the most basic cellphone plans cost. I’ve personally never talked for longer than about 200 minutes a month, but there’s plenty of people with the damn phone stuck to their ear out there, if that”s the case, prepaid is probably not for you.