$10-a-month cellphone plan might be right choice for you
Unreal Mobile deal offers 1 GB of high-speed data
LOS ANGELES – FreedomPop, which sells low-cost wireless service, came up with its best deal ever in late June: $10 a month for text, talk and data service, and it offered $50 phones to boot.
Consumers snapped up the service, and FreedomPop’s new Unreal Mobile subsidiary sold out of most of the phones. It’s scrambling now to get more inventory beyond the refurbished $249 iPhone 6, $149 Samsung Galaxy S6 and
$99 S5 phones, along with the new $50 Alcatel Dawn phones.
The monthly price is eye-popping. Sprint, for example, charges $40 monthly for a plan with a 2 GB data cap, or you can pay $45 monthly with T-Mobile or AT&T with 2 GB of data as well. (Verizon’s “unlimited” offer starts at $70 monthly.)
Meanwhile, shoppers want to know – how is the service?
I decided to find out. I brought a refurbished Samsung Galaxy S7 the company loaned to me (original release:
2015) on a recent trip to the Pacific Northwest and had adequate service in coastal Oregon, up and down Washington State and on Whidbey Island. Coverage was a little spottier in the town of Port Townsend, which is at the tip of Washington, about two hours north of Seattle. And I’ve been using the phone back home near Los Angeles, as well.
The plan gets me a signal. It connects to other phones. The phone rings when you get calls. You can send text messages and receive e-mails. You can look up things on the web. You can watch videos on YouTube, albeit in lower resolution, “DVD quality,” but they looked fine on a 5.1-inch screen. No complaints here.
For $10 a month, what more do you need?
For many, the answer would be consistent, high-speed service. Unreal Mobile offers you just 1 GB of high-speed data as part of the $10 plan, or 2 GB if you’re willing to spend $15 monthy.
After I ate through the 2 GB of data by letting YouTube roll on and on, service got slowed down to 512 kbps, which is somewhere in-between 2G and 3G, FreedomPop Chief Executive Officer Stephen Stokols told me.
That’s enough data to do email, text and instant message, but it would make watching video a chore, he notes.
In my own tests, opening web pages was slower at the reduced speed, but not unusable. CNN.com opened in 37 seconds (vs. three on my iPhone X with T-Mobile), Amazon in seven seconds (vs. three) and Sprint 12 seconds, again vs. three seconds. In a nutshell, those waited seconds were the price of throttling, or using the phone at lower speeds once I used up data.
The service is through the Sprint network, which has long been considered to have the weakest reach of the big four wireless carriers. However, the phone should work best in most big cities.
If you buy one of Unreal’s three cheap, refurbished phones, the iPhone
6 ($249) Galaxy S6 ($149) or Galaxy S5
($99), you’ll get an older model with less power and a camera that’s not as advanced as others. Some newer apps may not work with the phones, since Unreal is offering phones that aren’t as current. However, you can bring your own phone to Unreal service, as long as it’s been on the Sprint or Verizon networks, which uses the CDMA standard. (Unreal also sells the new Alcatel Dawn smartphone for $50.)
Stokols says the service works with “most” Sprint and Verizon phones. Later in the summer, Unreal will begin offering SIM cards to work on phones on the T-Mobile and AT&T GSM networks as well.
FreedomPop has been dogged by brutal reviews online for its customer service, which Stokols has tried to address, he says, by hiring more workers. We called support three times and got through in minutes. “Which is a good sign,” Stokols said.