I signed my son up for a Wind Mobile cell phone account. And he’s very happy with it. The way it works is you sign up for a plan and buy a cell phone – we got a Samsung Gravity 2. He wanted this model because it has a slide-out keyboard for texting.
You can choose between paying for your plan at the beginning of each month billing cycle or paying at the end of the cycle (running a tab). I chose paying at the beginning of each monthly billing cycle because then I know exactly how much the month’s usage will be.
Originally I intended to get him the cheapest plan; 100 text messages plus 150 minutes of talk time. But since you can change the plan any time, i thought better to avoid running out of air time and got the unlimited talk and text plan which is just $25 a month + $3 HST/GST. I reasoned that I could always downgrade the plan if he wasn’t using the phone much. It turned out that he sent more than 150 text messages just the first day.
Unlimited talk and text (SMS messages). within your home Wind Mobile zone is normally $25 + $3 GST/HST = $28 a month ($336 for the year). But if you port a number to your new Wind Mobile account you get an additional $10/month discount for 10 months ($200 + $24 tax = $224 for the year).
So now I’m planning on opening a Wind Mobile account for myself and porting my Telus home land line phone number. The Telus line costs $30.36 + $3.64 GST/HST = $34/month ($408 a year)
The cell plan works out to almost 1/2 the price of my existing home fixed line,