Alltel Vs Att

Pay-As-You-Go Faceoff: Alltel vs. AT&T | Prepaid Reviews

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Our No. 1 goal here at Prepaid Reviews is to arm you with information necessary to make a decision on your cell phone carrier. A while back, we ran a series of columns called We Help You Decide , in which we profiled various phone users and how each of our featured providers matched up with each one. That’s still a viable source of information, but now we’re taking a step further. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to pit pay-as-you-go plans head to head to see which ones come out ahead. This is strictly for per-minute or per-day plans. The monthly rate plans will duke it out later. Up this week, Alltel vs. AT&T . Is it fair to use Alltel’s pay-per-day plan as a comparison here? After all, it is a pay-as-you-go — it just bundles your entire day into a flat rate, plus excess charges. In that case, it’s 75 cents per day for two of the following four features (and 25 cents each if you want more): unlimited mobile-to-mobile, unlimited favorite number calling, unlimited text messaging, unlimited nights and weekends. And then you have calls at 10 cents per minute. Sweet, huh?

Yes, you can get calls for 10 cents per minute with AT&T. You just have to pay a one dollar per day access fee. Now, it does give you unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes, which are far more valuable than Alltel’s mobile-to-mobile minutes, since AT&T crushes Alltel in subscriber numbers.

However, Alltel’s pay-per-day plan lays down the Hammer of Thor on AT&T otherwise. You can scrap the mobile-to-mobile minutes and take the other three options for the same per-day rate as AT&T charges you for just mobile-to-mobile. After that, call rates are the same. Except with Alltel, you won’t be paying for your night and weekend calls, whereas with AT&T you’ll run up your bill doing so. Unless, that is, you want to pay another $20 per month for 3,000 night and weekend minutes. But really, that’s just a $10 discount.

You’ll also be hit with text messaging charges with AT&T, a feature known to slowly inflate a cell phone bill. While Alltellers can text whoever they want, whenever they want with their plan, AT&T customers will be paying 15 cents per text message, both incoming and outgoing. No, you did not read that wrong. A hundred text messages with Alltel’s pay-per-day: zero dollars. A hundred text messages with AT&T’s pay-as-you-go: $15. This puts Alltel’s plan completely out of AT&T’s league.

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