Ting: Tucows' Venture into the MVNO Business

[silentjudge]

Not too many people in this boat. For most people, they will never get the use out of unlimited.

I'm not talking about unlimited. Can you not read? I'm pointing out how the cost per GB is HIGHER than that of AT&T postpaid.
$42/2GB is greater than $25/2GB on AT&T Postpaid. Now do you understand my point?

[Endeavor]

I'm afraid I'm just not understanding you.

Ting charges $42.00 for 2GB. AT&T's prepaid offering would charge you $25 per 500MB ($100 for 2GB), and you'd still have to buy voice service. I just can't see how $42.00 is more expensive than $100.00. To me, $42 seems like it is $58.00 cheaper than $100.00.

T-Mobile's Value Plan suffers from a different issue. First, you have to agree to a 2-year contract. Second, you pay the full amount even on months when you don't use the full amount. The reason that AT&T/Tmo/Sprint/Verizon make such great profits is by charging excessive overage fees and forcing risk averse consumers to buy more than they really need to avoid them. If you're going to compare Ting to another provider, you need to take into account that your usage on that other carrrier will rarely be what you actually buy. It will usually be far less.

So, when you compare to Ting, don't compare the 2GB price unless you are certain you are going to use 2GB every month.

2GB or 3GB isn't unlimited. I'm not asking for unlimited, dont get me wrong here. I'm comparing their data pricing to AT&T's data pricing and at $42/2GB or $60/3GB, they are clearly charging more than AT&T.

On T-Mobile for example, if you get a Value plan (no contract, but full price phone), you get $5-10 off on the data each month as compared to Postpaid (Classic plans).

Thats my rationale for bringing that up.

[Endeavor]

Oh, I get it. You are comparing AT&T's Postpaid Data Add-on Price with Ting's Data Prices. This isn't a fair comparison, because you cannot buy AT&T's Postpaid Data Add-on Price by itself, just as you can't buy Ting's Data services by itself.

The proper comparison would be to compare the actual price of using Ting's 2GB of Data with the actual price of using AT&T's 2GB of Data.

i.e.
Ting: $6.00 per line, $42.00 for data = $50 for 2GB per month
AT&T Postpaid: $39.99 (their cheapest plan, with 450 minutes), $25 for data = $65.00 for 2GB per month

Over two years, that's $360 of savings on Ting if all you want is 2GB of Data.

If you actually want to use voice as well, you could do this comparison:

Ting: $6.00 per device, $9 for 500 minutes, $42 for 2GB Data = $59
AT&T: $39.99 (450 minutes), $15 for 2GB Data = $65.00

That's $144.00 in savings on Ting vs. AT&T.

And again, that's assuming that you actually use 2GB of Data every month, forever. If there is even one month where you use only 1GB of data, you would save an additional $17.00 on Ting for each such month. If you didn't use data at all one month, you'd save $42.00 that month over AT&T on top of the savings that I've already discussed.

In most cases, people who go with AT&T/Tmo/Verizon are buying for their worst month. For example, on AT&T, I would never go with the $15 per month plan. I use about 350-500 GB per month, and that would cost me $30.00 per month. So, instead, I'd pay $25 per month to get 2GB, even though I NEVER use that much.

Finally, you apparently omitted the word "postpaid" from your prior postings, so it would have been impossible for me to know that you were comparing a contracted plan with a non-contracted plan, which is another reason why your comparison is unfair. But, in answer to your question, yes, I can read, but I cannot read minds.

I'm not talking about unlimited. Can you not read? I'm pointing out how the cost per GB is HIGHER than that of AT&T postpaid.
$42/2GB is greater than $25/2GB on AT&T Postpaid. Now do you understand my point?

[Endeavor]

Where can you buy an Iphone for $300? Is it the CDMA version or the GSM version?

Not too many people in this boat. For most people, they will never get the use out of unlimited.

It's no different to unlimited local or even unlimited voip (vonage). The second I switched to pay per use callcentric, I saved big time.

Their plan structure actually looks really good, only big big problem is the lack of BYOD. For $300 I can buy an Iphone 4 outright.

[dbarbour]

I've read Verizon roaming on several reviews.

Can anyone verify that it's also on US Cellular?

And any others?

Thanks!
Dwight

[silentjudge]

I've read Verizon roaming on several reviews.

Can anyone verify that it's also on US Cellular?

And any others?

Thanks!
Dwight

Its the same coverage as Sprint postpaid. So you can look at the Sprint postpaid coverage map:
http://coverage.sprint.com/IMPACT.jsp?INTNAV=ATG:FT:Cov

Just no data while roaming, talk/text is fine.

[Conan Edogawa]

Looks like Ting is now open to the public.

[larrycl]

In reading the fine print, I noticed TING has a $35/line activation fee. I tweeted to them asking about this, and they said it basically recoups their costs (e.g, they are not making any money on this fee.)

Seems hard to believe......

[eb86]

Wow, I think I may have to try this out. I currently am on the $25/month plan with Virgin Mobile, use little to no minutes, very little data, and text a lot, but I could switch to using Google Voice to text using data (I don't imagine it uses much data for texting.) since I'm mostly on wifi anyways, which would save me even more money. It won't be a big difference me for price-wise (at least with my usage at this point), but the better coverage, better phone selection, and better customer service would be worth it.

[IsLand_BoY]

Super tempting.. As others have mentioned, not for heavy data use and geared toward family-plan type sharing.

My gf and I both have postpaid phones with T-Mobile, but we also both have Virgin Mobile phones on the old $25 plan. Around 100min/month voice, 100-200 messages, and 100-200mb data, for each of our phones. Ting could turn out being even cheaper despite our grandfathered rates!

Very very interesting. I'm curious to see how Ting does. I don't need a lot of data (or anything really) because I have my T-Mobile phone, but we keep a spare phone for things like Craigslist and what not. Plus, while traveling, Sprint works amazingly well. We've gone on a couple of trips and several times we found our expensive Galaxy S II phones showing "no service" so we pulled out our Virgin Mobile phones.

[cnjbarman]

This a la carte pricing is over that of all you can eat deals. So if someone I know uses almost 3000 minutes a month and no text or data it would cost $52 on ting plus there are line fees of $6, 40 on pp, 40 on simplemobile and you get texts on the last 2 as well as data on simple.

You want data, 2 gigs is 42 dollars plus there are line fees of $6 and you dont get anything else, on straighttalk its 45(cheaper if you get 3 month deal) and simplemobile its 40 AND you get talk and text on both.

35 dollar activation fee! and these high prices for individual services. Never.

edit: the only thing that looks doable on ting is texting and I have no use for that and dont research that. $8+$6 line fee $14 for 2000 txt no talk/data might be good for some. Or 4000 txt for $17, or 6000 txt for $20.

[eb86]

This is obviously not geared more for heavy users (data especially), but for light to moderate users, families (due to everything being combined in one account, you can also disable features for each line if you want, including turning off data, so you can get your kids smartphones like the Optimus and make them only able to use data over wifi), and/or people whose usage varies a lot, especially if you have months where you hardly use your phone at all; if you had something like StraightTalk and have months where you don't do much, you're still paying the same amount each month. It is a great deal for people like that, you don't end up paying for more than you use. I would estimate my monthly bill to be about $15-$25/month after tax depending on data use. The activation fee and higher device costs are negligible in the long run when you take that into account, as well as taking into account the free voice/text roaming on Verizon and better customer service (i.e. they have a no-hold policy, they don't outsource their customer service, and they don't have different departments so you won't get transferred to another department if a person can't help you because they train everyone to do everything, you can read about their customer service here and here). Here is further information on devices, why they currently don't offer BYOD, and so on.

As for them being able to 'make it' or not, I don't think there will be any issues with that.

"Ken from Ting here.

We're part of publicly traded Internet company (Tucows) that's been around since 1994. We're not going anywhere. "

[DP102288]

I love the concept very much. Even if it were slightly more expensive, I would go with them based on principle. I would love to just pay for what I use. Unfortunately, I can't rely on Sprint as my sole source of coverage.

My other question...there is no other charges for using WiMax with Ting? I didn't see anything.

[eb86]

I couldn't find anything either. Considering how clear they make everything else about their service (even the videos explaining how to use each phone approach things from the point of view of a beginner), if they did charge more to use it, they'd say so, though that would go against how they want everything to be simple and easy to understand (charging different for using 4g would muck things up and make billing more complicated than they want it).

[Endeavor]

There is no question that Ting is not for the heavy user. It is for familiar with light to moderate usage for voice and data. For texts, even heavy usage should be fine on Ting. It works even better for families.

However, if any of family members are data hogs, they'd probably be better on Straight Talk ($45 per month for GSM), Prepayd Wireless ($45 per month for the same coverage as Ting) or Republic Wireless ($20 per month for the same coverage as Ting). And if any of your families just need a phone for emergency use and they never have emergencies, Spot Mobile would be better (minimum payment of $20 per year, and that goes towards airtime at $.10 per minute, with T-mobile's postpaid coverage).

I also want to second the comment about Ting's customer service. Ting's Canadian-based customer service is the best I've ever encountered in the mobile universe. It is even better than the service offered by the major carriers. The representatives are all highly knowledgable, and unwilling to simply make something up if they don't know the answer. If you are ever going to have a problem with your wireless service, you should pray that it happens while you're using Ting.