And I just wish I could’ve done it quicker. In the past year I’ve been with AT&T / Cingular on the cheapest $39.99 plan I’ve had the following available to me, 400 + an additional 50 free minutes and Unlimited Nights & Weekends. Oh and 0 SMS with the cost per SMS at $.10, great really. Not. At least not when you send a max of 5 SMS per month and haven’t had a single month in which you went over 100 minutes.

Making matters worse I’ve never had a bill that’s run my $39.99. This month I just paid $52.07, previous month was $53.55, etc. All that for my wonderful 100 minutes max usage. So rather than paying $.10 a minute or something reasonable I’ve been paying close to $1.92 a minute. Screw that.

Having just called Cingular to verify my contract end date I just received more bad news. I bought the phone off Amazon on November 10th so I thought my contract was already up. Apparently not, I was originally in San Jose with a 408 number but switched to a 425 number when I found out I was moving up to Redmond to work for Microsoft. I did that on January 12th, and so I’ve been told that Cingular created a entirely new service contract for me thus renewing my contract till January 12th, 2006. Grand.

So there you have it, hopefully, with fingers crossed, I’ll be switching to T-Mobile’s PAYG service on January 12th, 2006. I’ve also been told that T-Mobile with transfer my number, though of course if my PAYG expires then I’ll lose the number. Oh well.

Since I’ve not got any data services, which is another story, I figure I’ll be saving myself about $43 every month. I’ll start out with only the SIM and activate with the $25 card which should give me 130 minutes, that’ll probably last 2 months. Then I’ll pay $100 for 1000 minutes, those will expire after 1 year, not bad but not as good as PAYG in the UK . Figuring I make less than 100 minutes of calls every month I figure that one payment of $100 will last a full year.

Total savings after switch, $524!!! Man that’ll be a good feeling.

Tags: Home Life, Ideas, Outside, Rants