Ting announces new, lower rates

To celebrate their second anniversary as a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), Ting is giving U.S. customers a reason to join in the celebration, offering rate changes, including a handful of lower rates across their service levels. The focus is on savings for heavy data usage.

On their blog, Ting makes it a point that this is not a promotion, they are just dropping their rates. Current users will begin to see savings on their next monthly bill and new users will receive the new rates no matter what carrier they are coming from. They continue to offer their contract free service to users of unlocked phones that run on the Sprint network.

Ting offers one service plan that automatically graduates through their pricing levels, or reduces levels if needed, meaning you only pay for what you use. The new rate plan eliminates their old top tier, raises the upper limit of the remaining upper level and reduces the per unit cost thereafter.

Ting believes that 98% of current cellphone users will see a savings by using their services. Although this may be true for users of the major carriers, I used their rate calculator to compare their rates to those of a T-Mobile based MVNO, Simple Mobile. The result was a message stating that I am a part of the 2% that would not see a savings by switching to Ting, immediately followed by the suggestion that I probably input my numbers incorrectly and a number of suggestions to help me benefit from their services.

The major factor in my sample was a test of their heavy data usage benefits – Ting’s top tier offers 2000MB of data for $29, with $0.015 per additional MB. Simple Mobile does not breakout their fee strictly for data, but $50 gets you a plan with 3GB of 4G data and unlimited data at throttled speeds thereafter. I used 3000MB  in Ting’s calculator to get the above results, however, with 1000MB of usage, I could save $136 per year.

The bottom line, Ting and other MVNO options offer an excellent option for those looking to shed their contracts with the big carriers, especially now with their great new rates. Do you use an MVNO? How has your service been?

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