Last month, I switched cellphone providers from T-Mobile to Ting. In looking at past reports, I had been paying T-Mobile around $63 per month (including taxes). This didn’t seem bad to me, but I thought I could do better. A couple of days ago, I got my first bill from Ting. The total is $39.81 (including taxes). I’m happy with this. The image below shows the breakdown of all the fees.

ting

So I’m saving around $23 per month. If I used the cell phone less, I’d save more. And if I used it more, I’d save less. This is actually one of the things I like about Ting. You pay for what you use. So you can conserve to save money. However, I had looked at around six months of bills to find out my usage. And I was pretty consistent. I’m guessing that on most months, I’ll still be on the M plan, which will keep my costs pretty consistent.

Note however, the two services are not providing the exact same services. I have an iphone and one big difference is that T-Mobile had visual voicemail, where you could see who the voicemail was from without having to dial in. Ting does not have that. When you click on the voicemail button, it calls the service and you enter your pin to hear the voicemail. Visual voicemail is a nice feature, but I really don’t miss it. First of all, I wouldn’t have even noticed this except that I got one call that left a voicemail. Since I so rarely get voicemail, it seems silly to pay $20/month extra for that feature. The other thing I noticed and this is just because I happened to go to Canada during the month, is that I get no service in Canada. When I had T-Mobile and went to Canada, it automatically switched over to Rogers service and didn’t cost me anything extra to use it. This was really handy and I definitely missed having cell service on this trip. But, how often do I go to Canada? Based on my last two years, it’s been about once a year for approximately three days. Again, should I pay for something monthly that I’m going to use so infrequently? A better idea might be to get a T-mobile chip for a month and take that with me when I go to Canada. If I go again next year, perhaps I’ll look into that.

Anyway, based on this month, those were the only two things that I noticed were different. Perhaps other things might come up in the future, but so far things are working as expected. I’m considering switching to Ting a complete success. Complete disclosure: I had already had an unlocked iphone that I was using on T-Mobile, so all I had to buy to switch to Ting was a new sim card that cost me $13. If you don’t have an unlocked phone, you may have to buy one and that could cost you a few hundred dollars. Though you can buy refurbished ones directly from Ting.

If you’d like to switch to Ting, I’d recommend it. And if you’d sign up using this link, I’d appreciate it even more.