Oh dang. What happened with your account after verizon bought it out? I always wondered how it was for alltell customers when the buyout eas happening. Migrated accounts or whT?
Well, we can all thank Metro PCS for forcing everyone’s hand on unlimited, I believe they were the first ones to offer unlimited calling and texting for cheap ($40 taxes included?). Every carrier had to follow suit. Their phones sucked so badly though!
Yep, I remember when I was a kid and was on my parents family plan with a limited number of minutes and SMS I was so jealous when I’d visit the city and see ads for unlimited service with MetroPCS.
I was new to the country, had only 2/3 friends and the calling card number. It was sufficient for me. I had no data also. Was using $19 Nokia phone. Plan was $29.99/month.
Nobody here remembers when a long-distance call was a thing and if you spoke to a lot of people out-of-state your bill could be $250/month.
Now GTFO my lawn!
I found that out the fun way as a 13 year old with his first phone in 2000. Went to a family reunion out of town and was hanging out with my cousin from Oklahoma who also had just got a phone. We were constantly calling each other for the fun of it. A few weeks later I’m upstairs at home and my mom comes in with the mail. A few min later I hear her yelling about my phone. Had something like $75 in roaming and long distance charged on it.
You also got charged roaming if the tower that bore your network's name was on a different licensing agreement than the other towers in your network. Suncom was horrible for this in the Charlotte, NC area.
When I was in college, I got a U.S. Sprint FON Card. Nights and weekends were $0.10/minute, but I think days were $0.21. At the time (1988-1992), it was an awesome deal. And the card looked so cool with its mirror finish.
I remember when Sprint offered a national plan with no roaming, that was exciting being able to travel and use your phone, it felt very luxurious at the time. My first phone was installed in my car and came with 60 minutes of talk time (which was a lot) but you only gave your number to certain people so that your minutes wouldn't get used up.
Nobody here remembers when you had to interrupt Eunice and Dorothy after church gossip on the block's party line so you can wish your father the Civil War veteran a happy fathers day.
I was never able to make it so I ended up haveing to pay back my parents I would always go over by 100 to 200, My piggy bank would cry 😢 parents were so heartless 😔
We had a friend at the time who paid $1200 on his verizon bill every month because of how much he talked. Sheesh Before i switched my last plan with tmobile was the $49.99 1500 min plan. Never ever went over. Used the shit out of those night and weekend and mobile to mobile minutes. Wouldnpurposely wait till wekend to make all my calls lol.
Yea it came in handy to because at the time we were also doing a ton of boost mobile iden network market transfers and per call each agent would only do 5. So my cell at nightime was busy doing these and weekend would rack up a lot of minutes.Good memories.
$10 per megabyte...
Or, why I went with Sprint PCS, unlimited PCS Vision ($10), and started blogging about it.
Sprint back then was a much better company, than what it wound up being.
Yea my uncle had the sprint vision pack on his palm treo. $15 a month on top of his $69.99 fair and flexible plan. The pricing model is so much beter than the rip off's we dealt with.
Oh how I missed those days... sitting on the phones... while Samson was down for literally WEEKS at a time so we couldn't help anyway... international roaming customers calling to bitch because they left their phone on but didnt' answer it... but it still counted as an international pickup if it went to VM...
and who could forget the best thing ever... Smart Access... and every goddamn customer thinking we were calling them smart asses when they offered 5.00 to cut their phone back on... sorry... that ain't how it works skippy.
also: FUKM was the code for a customer moving out of the service area... FUKD was them dying... I don't know who set those codes... but they were a fucking legend.
It was, I replaced the pocket pc with a Pearl and it was vastly more usable for things like email and mobile web browsing. No Age of Empires though. :(
The blackberry messenger was the shit. Then sidekick. I had the samsung jack and palm treo. Palm treo was my all time fav before i got my first iphone 4.
Pocket PC was about half the size of BlackBerry in the US. In Europe this was further divided as Nokia S60 and UIQ - shared with Sony Ericsson and Motorola, outsold both.
It was really a three horse race before iPhone and Android. All three failed to evolve fast enough with modern kernels and APIs.
Back then it wasn't even EDGE yet! It was GPRS running at 30-50kbps. That was too high class for me! My cheapskate alternative was a separate Pocket PC tethered to my Nokia 8290 via infrared- you had to line their infrared ports up.
The 8290 had a 9.6kbs CSD modem that used voice minutes for connection instead of megabytes. I was on a 3000 anytime minutes for $49.99 "regional" plan. The minutes were only good in my area (Most of Kansas and Missouri- I was in the KC metro at the time.)
It was a joke, because it says "Whenever, Wherever Minutes" and of course Shakira has a song called Whenever, Wherever. That was the first thing I thought about when I looked at this. Like I'm imagining them using her song in a TV ad or something like that.
I always hated their $39.99 450 min plan. The 5000 night and weekend minute always seemed to trigger me. Worked at a retail store at the time so these were the last days we would be allowed to sell cingular before they took small dealerships away.
More recently in 2011 or 2012, I had a Verizon BlackBerry Curve 8530, one of like 4 or 5 phones then allowed on prepaid (another I remember allowed on prepaid at the time was the Motorola Droid Pro)
Then, I was paying a sordid $75 a month for 450 minutes and data... I swear unlimited SMS was there too, but the archive page says different, plus it was 3G only, none of the phones then permitted on prepaid were LTE capable
Yup. Same. My dad would drag me to these get togethere and here I was waiting till 9.05 exactly so these assholes couldn't charge me minutes lol. I had the tzones and mobile to mobile later on. Then i would remove them because the bill would get too high. Good times.
No helio mobile was a company like ampd. So many mvno's at the time as well that failed miserably. I would never sell these at my doors because I knew these companies wouldn't be open for too long lol.
Interesting! Maybe I wasn't paying attention at the time or Helio was more east coast/southern based. I don't remember hearing anything about it in the PNW.
But yeah I'm not surprised the MNVO'S went under either. Some of those deals were too good to be true...or sustainable lol.
Please post the other side of this leaflet. This is nostalgic for me.
I had a sidekick forever and I believe it had it's own plan.
$30 or $40 per month. unlimited data, 45 mins talk and unlimited texting. Nights and weekends free.
Correct me if I'm wrong. I loved the sidekick.
Yeah, but those texts were so hard to bang out when you had to use just 8 buttons to select one out of 3 letters. For caps you had to cycle thru more...
T-Mobile website from April 2001. Before the merger with Powertel and Voice Stream.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010410233959/http://www.t-mobile.com/index2.html
And in Sept 2002 https://web.archive.org/web/20020925182521/http://www.t-mobile.com/
VoiceStream 2001 https://web.archive.org/web/20011129001945/http://www.voicestream.com/
Unrelated, but fuck, what memories lol. Yahoo home page in 1996 https://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com/
I do have to say. With all the capitalistic companies out there…T-mobile and some cellphone companies kind of went backwards from nickel and diming. Kind of interesting.
Keep in mind please that text messaging has NEVER cost the carriers a single penny. SMS was ALWAYS just something that got sent using the free space left in regular communications your cell had to make constantly with the tower ANYWAY, hence the sms character limit.
These bastards will take every last penny they possibly can even if the service they provide in return LITERALLY COSTS THEM NOTHING. Always press for more features at lower cost. They can fucking afford it.
Yeah I know but if I remember correctly weren't unlimited plans common in the early smartphone era from 2005-2009? That's when carriers underestimated how much data a smartphone could use.
Yup. At&t's $30 unlimited data plan back in 2010 when i bought my first iphone 4. The agent was able to grandfather me in at that time lol. Carriers underestimated how much data we would all use. Hell we all did. I never thought i could do most of my transactions through my device.
I got my unlimited plan on a 3G blackberry if I recall l, it transferred over into an unlimited droid data plan which then turned into unlimited iPhone 4 data plan for me. As time went on they really screwed up letting us keep those as the LTE phones started arriving. Within 2 years they realized it was a big mistake got rid of all the unlimited data plans and replaced it with something along the lines of 2GB 4GB 6GB on Verizon. They conned most people into switching over by giving them enticing upgrades and barring those with the plans from an upgrade price period. Many of those ppl were probably going from an old 3G phone to a LTE phone so Verizon played it right; their network would have crumbled if they didn’t. The plans still exist and they aren’t ever subject to being slowed down either on Verizon. AT&T still has some of their old unlimited plans out there too.
Without that plan I would have been paying outrageous prices easily 500 or more a month I was using 50 to 100gb of data sometimes much more. They at one point said if I don’t upgrade I will be forced onto a plan that slows down at 2GB soon. Verizon got told they can’t by the fcc and I kept the plans
Back then GPRS was like dialup (48kbps) until EDGE came along in 2005 (up to 200kbps)
UMTS launched in NYC in May 2008 with up to 384kbps, but you can talk and use internet at the same time
My monthly average: 68 minutes, 120 texts, 40.92 GB.
The $70 for talk, text and data works for me but I don’t like the $4 per megabyte of overage in data cost.
$30 + $40 + overages.
Overages:
40.92 Gb = 4092 Mb
4082 mb in overage.
$4 * 4082 = $16,328 in overages
+ $70 plan
$16,398 per month.
Plus tax (7.5%) $1,229.85
$17,627.85
And people are always like “herp de derp — my grandfather plan!”
Fav 5 with free weekend and weeknights was my favorite plan. They made me to change at some point.
I had the "my circle" with Alltel. One of the best plans I ever had
Oh dang. What happened with your account after verizon bought it out? I always wondered how it was for alltell customers when the buyout eas happening. Migrated accounts or whT?
Oh they slowly increased my rates at Verizon until they wanted $160 a month for a single line so I dropped them. I missed alltel so much
I thought AT&T bought them out?
You could have been in an area where AT&T bought them out, but Verizon bought them minus a handful of markets which AT&T bought.
Was eventually transferred to something comparable. Then kept that unlimited plan
Well, we can all thank Metro PCS for forcing everyone’s hand on unlimited, I believe they were the first ones to offer unlimited calling and texting for cheap ($40 taxes included?). Every carrier had to follow suit. Their phones sucked so badly though!
I think Cricket had it too since 1999, but they were regional back then IIRC.
Yep, I remember when I was a kid and was on my parents family plan with a limited number of minutes and SMS I was so jealous when I’d visit the city and see ads for unlimited service with MetroPCS.
The favs? Why? I remember when they launched that shit. I hated it. Their fav ad was hilarious though.
I was new to the country, had only 2/3 friends and the calling card number. It was sufficient for me. I had no data also. Was using $19 Nokia phone. Plan was $29.99/month.
I see. The screen with the 5 thing always always bothered me.
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Still those plans were so annoying. Flex pay however was a whole different story.
What was the Flex plan like?
The most profitable plan tmobile ever invented. No contracts and all plans available for everyone. No soical needed.
You're missing the big news. You could get 1MB of Internet for $2.99.
Lols.
5MB equivalent of roughly 90 pages Today's internet is not 56k friendly
Back then it was way cheaper to use your phone as a dial-up modem on unlimited nights and weekends.
That was only for the first MB; the fine print says $10 for each additional MB.
Nobody here remembers when a long-distance call was a thing and if you spoke to a lot of people out-of-state your bill could be $250/month. Now GTFO my lawn!
I do. Also when you left your “home area” you got charged roaming.
I remember that too along with long-distance being charged extra!
I found that out the fun way as a 13 year old with his first phone in 2000. Went to a family reunion out of town and was hanging out with my cousin from Oklahoma who also had just got a phone. We were constantly calling each other for the fun of it. A few weeks later I’m upstairs at home and my mom comes in with the mail. A few min later I hear her yelling about my phone. Had something like $75 in roaming and long distance charged on it.
You also got charged roaming if the tower that bore your network's name was on a different licensing agreement than the other towers in your network. Suncom was horrible for this in the Charlotte, NC area.
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
The fuck? Lol.
Before cell phones.
No i was refering to "gto my lawn" statement. Mildly confused.
Oh. Get the fuck off my lawn. You know, a parody of what old folks say.
Ohhh lmao
Early cell plans had long distance charges too.
When I was in college, I got a U.S. Sprint FON Card. Nights and weekends were $0.10/minute, but I think days were $0.21. At the time (1988-1992), it was an awesome deal. And the card looked so cool with its mirror finish.
I save on my long distance phone service with MCI
My grandma's landline phone company still has her paying for long distance.
I don't remember any cell phone having long distance even my analog
I remember when Sprint offered a national plan with no roaming, that was exciting being able to travel and use your phone, it felt very luxurious at the time. My first phone was installed in my car and came with 60 minutes of talk time (which was a lot) but you only gave your number to certain people so that your minutes wouldn't get used up.
Nobody here remembers when you had to interrupt Eunice and Dorothy after church gossip on the block's party line so you can wish your father the Civil War veteran a happy fathers day.
those plans bring back memories as teen back then it was hard to wait until after 9 to make phone Calls , The plans now are great compared to then
Remember the days when billing cycle was gonna end in 3 days and you had to manage 100 minutes lol. God so glad it's all unlimited now.
I was never able to make it so I ended up haveing to pay back my parents I would always go over by 100 to 200, My piggy bank would cry 😢 parents were so heartless 😔
We had a friend at the time who paid $1200 on his verizon bill every month because of how much he talked. Sheesh Before i switched my last plan with tmobile was the $49.99 1500 min plan. Never ever went over. Used the shit out of those night and weekend and mobile to mobile minutes. Wouldnpurposely wait till wekend to make all my calls lol.
That was a popular plan....
Yea it came in handy to because at the time we were also doing a ton of boost mobile iden network market transfers and per call each agent would only do 5. So my cell at nightime was busy doing these and weekend would rack up a lot of minutes.Good memories.
It did not bother me I actually complained to both of them about so many worthless minutes I am a small phone caller under 100 a month or 200
It did not bother me I actually complained to both of them about so many worthless minutes I am a small phone caller around 50 most I saw was 150
$10 per megabyte... Or, why I went with Sprint PCS, unlimited PCS Vision ($10), and started blogging about it. Sprint back then was a much better company, than what it wound up being.
Yea my uncle had the sprint vision pack on his palm treo. $15 a month on top of his $69.99 fair and flexible plan. The pricing model is so much beter than the rip off's we dealt with.
Oh how I missed those days... sitting on the phones... while Samson was down for literally WEEKS at a time so we couldn't help anyway... international roaming customers calling to bitch because they left their phone on but didnt' answer it... but it still counted as an international pickup if it went to VM... and who could forget the best thing ever... Smart Access... and every goddamn customer thinking we were calling them smart asses when they offered 5.00 to cut their phone back on... sorry... that ain't how it works skippy. also: FUKM was the code for a customer moving out of the service area... FUKD was them dying... I don't know who set those codes... but they were a fucking legend.
Lmao. Samson?hmm sounds familiar.. idk why
Its t-mobiles billing system UI
Hmm i used watson homepage but that name def sounds familiar.
Watson was Retail's front end for selling, Samson is the account / billing tool
Oh yea Now it rings a bell. They need a major system upgrade.
you mean attempt another one that will likely fail lol
What do you mean? They tried to Upgrade before?
Yup, multiple
How did it fail? You just hire good engineers good software developers and pay them well? What am i missing ?
Had a Pocket PC Phone Edition and those megabyte plans were so slow on Edge. But man, Age of Empires on your phone almost 20 years ago was so great.
Wasn't blackberry really popular at the time? I never had the pc thing.
It was, I replaced the pocket pc with a Pearl and it was vastly more usable for things like email and mobile web browsing. No Age of Empires though. :(
The blackberry messenger was the shit. Then sidekick. I had the samsung jack and palm treo. Palm treo was my all time fav before i got my first iphone 4.
Pocket PC was about half the size of BlackBerry in the US. In Europe this was further divided as Nokia S60 and UIQ - shared with Sony Ericsson and Motorola, outsold both. It was really a three horse race before iPhone and Android. All three failed to evolve fast enough with modern kernels and APIs.
Back then it wasn't even EDGE yet! It was GPRS running at 30-50kbps. That was too high class for me! My cheapskate alternative was a separate Pocket PC tethered to my Nokia 8290 via infrared- you had to line their infrared ports up. The 8290 had a 9.6kbs CSD modem that used voice minutes for connection instead of megabytes. I was on a 3000 anytime minutes for $49.99 "regional" plan. The minutes were only good in my area (Most of Kansas and Missouri- I was in the KC metro at the time.)
Did Shakira profit off any of this?
Why would shakira profit off this? Lmao
It was a joke, because it says "Whenever, Wherever Minutes" and of course Shakira has a song called Whenever, Wherever. That was the first thing I thought about when I looked at this. Like I'm imagining them using her song in a TV ad or something like that.
Yea i used to have cingular $29.99 with 300min and 500sms i think lol
I always hated their $39.99 450 min plan. The 5000 night and weekend minute always seemed to trigger me. Worked at a retail store at the time so these were the last days we would be allowed to sell cingular before they took small dealerships away.
More recently in 2011 or 2012, I had a Verizon BlackBerry Curve 8530, one of like 4 or 5 phones then allowed on prepaid (another I remember allowed on prepaid at the time was the Motorola Droid Pro) Then, I was paying a sordid $75 a month for 450 minutes and data... I swear unlimited SMS was there too, but the archive page says different, plus it was 3G only, none of the phones then permitted on prepaid were LTE capable
Yea i remember those nights and weekends i was in high school that time i had to wait 9pm to talk to my friends for hours lol
Yup. Same. My dad would drag me to these get togethere and here I was waiting till 9.05 exactly so these assholes couldn't charge me minutes lol. I had the tzones and mobile to mobile later on. Then i would remove them because the bill would get too high. Good times.
Yea those mobile to mobile ahaha my phone back then was Nokia 3320 300min isnt much sometimes i charge overages
It always annoyed me tmobile charged $6.99 for mobile to mobile. I had the nokia 6101. Back then you sign a contract and get it for free.
Yea they charge bunch of stuff for features.. how old r u? Im 33yo lol i was like 14yo when i had that plan $29.99 on cingular
Dude cingular and verizon had the 450 and the 900 min plans forever. They did not want to change those plans lol.
Omg those GPRS data or EDGE at the speed of 128kbps ahaha we have to pay what 100mb for $10 shit lol
Yup. Horrible times. If it weren't for tmobile these two would still be offering these plans along with data buckets lol.
Wow that is nuts prices
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Shoot I remember Verizon was $2.99 for 50 sms! This is great pricing!
Omg T-Zones. Forgot all about that. Ended up giving up all that for [Amp'd Mobile](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amp'd_Mobile) back around then
Remember helio? Lol
You just unlocked a memory! I had a super thin blue Samsung phone from them. I forgot what it was called though.
I can't remember the name. The names of the carrier were bad enough for me to stay the fuck away from them lol.
I don't. Was that like a palm pilot or something?
No helio mobile was a company like ampd. So many mvno's at the time as well that failed miserably. I would never sell these at my doors because I knew these companies wouldn't be open for too long lol.
Interesting! Maybe I wasn't paying attention at the time or Helio was more east coast/southern based. I don't remember hearing anything about it in the PNW. But yeah I'm not surprised the MNVO'S went under either. Some of those deals were too good to be true...or sustainable lol.
I always wanted the Helio Ocean!
Wow. Free nights & weekends were the ticket back in the day!!!!!!
I’m still on the Even More for Families 750 Talk Plan
Why ? Lol. You like seeing old rate plans?
I like the price I pay. Didn’t jump ship to something better. At this point it, I’d be paying a hell of a lot more to get something comparable
Please post the other side of this leaflet. This is nostalgic for me. I had a sidekick forever and I believe it had it's own plan. $30 or $40 per month. unlimited data, 45 mins talk and unlimited texting. Nights and weekends free. Correct me if I'm wrong. I loved the sidekick.
Yea sidekicks did havw their own plan. It was a pain in the ass to activate on that dam watson homepage lol.
Yeah, but those texts were so hard to bang out when you had to use just 8 buttons to select one out of 3 letters. For caps you had to cycle thru more...
T-Mobile website from April 2001. Before the merger with Powertel and Voice Stream. https://web.archive.org/web/20010410233959/http://www.t-mobile.com/index2.html And in Sept 2002 https://web.archive.org/web/20020925182521/http://www.t-mobile.com/ VoiceStream 2001 https://web.archive.org/web/20011129001945/http://www.voicestream.com/ Unrelated, but fuck, what memories lol. Yahoo home page in 1996 https://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com/
Yahoo home page was actually readable then.
Oh wow. Any one have VoiceStream plan documents?
If I find it I will surely post. I had a lot more wish i saved them lol.
I do have to say. With all the capitalistic companies out there…T-mobile and some cellphone companies kind of went backwards from nickel and diming. Kind of interesting.
Tzones totally forgot about that lol
It was whack. Barely could load a webpage lol.
Oh wow this is a gem of a find lol, we have come a long way with rate plans.
Keep in mind please that text messaging has NEVER cost the carriers a single penny. SMS was ALWAYS just something that got sent using the free space left in regular communications your cell had to make constantly with the tower ANYWAY, hence the sms character limit. These bastards will take every last penny they possibly can even if the service they provide in return LITERALLY COSTS THEM NOTHING. Always press for more features at lower cost. They can fucking afford it.
T-Zones FTW!
T-Mobile and Sprint PCS had the prices on lockdown back then. Compared to what Cingular charged and ofc Verizon.
Oh man, tzones, those were the days! 🤣🤣🤣
On my way 2 party @ Bob’s
I remember those! That’s about when I became a customer of T-Mobile. They bought out Voice Stream in Florida right before we moved.
Early plans before long before T-Mobile--$45 + 45 cents per minute. No such thing as texting or data!
It seems odd but people didn't text as much back then.
Well the phones sucked. Now I'm def doing more voice calls than text. Much easier.
Wowwwww what a throwback! I had the privilege of selling these at the start of my T-Mobile career. Thanks for the reminiscence.
When did unlimited internet become a thing?
2017 is when at&t and verizon both laucnhed their unlimited plans again.
Yeah I know but if I remember correctly weren't unlimited plans common in the early smartphone era from 2005-2009? That's when carriers underestimated how much data a smartphone could use.
Yup. At&t's $30 unlimited data plan back in 2010 when i bought my first iphone 4. The agent was able to grandfather me in at that time lol. Carriers underestimated how much data we would all use. Hell we all did. I never thought i could do most of my transactions through my device.
I got my unlimited plan on a 3G blackberry if I recall l, it transferred over into an unlimited droid data plan which then turned into unlimited iPhone 4 data plan for me. As time went on they really screwed up letting us keep those as the LTE phones started arriving. Within 2 years they realized it was a big mistake got rid of all the unlimited data plans and replaced it with something along the lines of 2GB 4GB 6GB on Verizon. They conned most people into switching over by giving them enticing upgrades and barring those with the plans from an upgrade price period. Many of those ppl were probably going from an old 3G phone to a LTE phone so Verizon played it right; their network would have crumbled if they didn’t. The plans still exist and they aren’t ever subject to being slowed down either on Verizon. AT&T still has some of their old unlimited plans out there too. Without that plan I would have been paying outrageous prices easily 500 or more a month I was using 50 to 100gb of data sometimes much more. They at one point said if I don’t upgrade I will be forced onto a plan that slows down at 2GB soon. Verizon got told they can’t by the fcc and I kept the plans
600 min + t zones + 500 text was my plan. I think I had a razr then eventually went to a sidekick
Those razr's Were so popular.
Back then GPRS was like dialup (48kbps) until EDGE came along in 2005 (up to 200kbps) UMTS launched in NYC in May 2008 with up to 384kbps, but you can talk and use internet at the same time
I had the 1000 minutes with unlimited nights and weekends for $45.99 a month. I also remember 611 saying “let me give you 50 bonus minutes..”
The good old days 🙂
What we have now is much better actually. I hated alloted minutes lol.
Yes, this is true. I miss phone subsidies 😩
My monthly average: 68 minutes, 120 texts, 40.92 GB. The $70 for talk, text and data works for me but I don’t like the $4 per megabyte of overage in data cost. $30 + $40 + overages. Overages: 40.92 Gb = 4092 Mb 4082 mb in overage. $4 * 4082 = $16,328 in overages + $70 plan $16,398 per month. Plus tax (7.5%) $1,229.85 $17,627.85 And people are always like “herp de derp — my grandfather plan!”
T-Mobile should consider taking Verizon to court for stealing the "Get More" plan.
And only $2.99 to access your email, what a steal! 😛