Cellular Phone Service Providers

The article I read is: Charge Mobile Data dumps your phone’s voice plan for pure data

While I find provider interesting, to a point, it's sort of a niche market (in my opinion anyway).

I've been with Ting mobile for a year now, and love how they price their plans... if one could call it a plan. Talk, text, and data are charged separately with its own tier structure, but you also pay for the number (a.k.a. "device"). Each device under your account costs 6 USD, and this is charged every month, along with whatever you use. If you don't talk, text, and/or use data for that month, you don't pay for those. For example, I just mainly use data, so I pay 6 USD plus 3 USD for the first data tier (1-100MB), making my bill 9 USD a month (a little over 10 USD after taxes and such).

The two caveats is that (1) calls from your cell phone to your voice mail are not free, and (2) any text messages you receive are also not free. Since I don't use text messages, I disabled that feature (there's better ways of getting a hold of me in a non-vocal way. But the main thing is that if and when I need to make/receive a phone call, I can. That one of my main irks with Charge, is that if someone can't contact you directly via telephone number (without having something set up).

The other problem with Charge is that it only works on Sprint's CDMA network at the moment, whereas Ting works on both CDMA and GSM (the latter being on T-Mobile's network). I'm sure Charge will expand, but it's a limitation that's not in their favour at the moment.

There's also Google's Project Fi, which doesn't seem bad either, but it's also not for me. 20 USD for unlimited talk and text (including international texts), and then 10 USD for every GB of data. Unused data (to the nearest 100MB I'm assuming) is refunded back to you, which is nice, but in my case, I'd be paying 21 USD (before taxes/fees), which is more than what I usually pay with Ting (between 9 and 12 USD before taxes/fees).

I've learned to be more frugal with my data plan with Ting, and so I hardly go over 100MB a month. Because of this, other providers don't really interest me much, because they can't offer what Ting offers me. And like I've said, I'm happy with Ting, so I haven't a need to shop around.