TR Forums

To OP - I received the exact same message yesterday. I doubt if I would have done anything with it. Thanks for the heads-up.

I just got this last night. Something tells me that Best Buy is not going to give me a gift certificate.

just brew it! wrote:

Texts have become essential to me, due to Sprint's crappy network in the far southwest 'burbs of Chicago. Texts will still go through even when voice calls are unintelligible.

The other thing to consider is that in the event of an emergency, your texts will most likely go through while voice calls will not. First, everyone & their mother will be calling to try and verify that loved ones are all right. This will saturate the towers. Second, the local emergency system may commandeer portions of the cell network for emergency services coordination.

I had the opportunity to test this during the hour after the earthquake last year. Much more effective to send SMS to family than trying to call.

Darkmage wrote:

I just got this last night. Something tells me that Best Buy is not going to give me a gift certificate.

just brew it! wrote:

Texts have become essential to me, due to Sprint's crappy network in the far southwest 'burbs of Chicago. Texts will still go through even when voice calls are unintelligible.

The other thing to consider is that in the event of an emergency, your texts will most likely go through while voice calls will not. First, everyone & their mother will be calling to try and verify that loved ones are all right. This will saturate the towers. Second, the local emergency system may commandeer portions of the cell network for emergency services coordination.

I had the opportunity to test this during the hour after the earthquake last year. Much more effective to send SMS to family than trying to call.

In theory. If the system uses actual SMS, then it is using a sideband frequency to transmit the messages and usually auto-retries until the transmission is accepted by the network. However, with cellular data networks now widespread, some systems are using SMTP or TCP/IP communication methods to transfer messages and could be delayed by a service saturation just as readily as an actual voice call.

Still, it doesn't hurt to try.

In the event of an emergency, I'm assuming cell phones won't work at all.
(But then the emergency I'm anticipating will probably leave me buried in rubble out of reach of my water jugs, so hopefully it'll be winter)

ludi wrote:

In theory.

Theory, my ass. It worked when I was standing in my parking lot, trying to tell my wife that yes indeed we felt the earth move and no they were not letting us back into the building. Nobody within earshot could get a cell call to go through.

UberGerbil wrote:

In the event of an emergency, I'm assuming cell phones won't work at all.
(But then the emergency I'm anticipating will probably leave me buried in rubble out of reach of my water jugs, so hopefully it'll be winter)

The Great Blackout of the East in 2003 knocked out all cell service, SMS included IIRC. POTS also went down eventually I believe.

Darkmage wrote:

ludi wrote:

In theory.

Theory, my ass. It worked when I was standing in my parking lot, trying to tell my wife that yes indeed we felt the earth move and no they were not letting us back into the building. Nobody within earshot could get a cell call to go through.

I don't doubt that it did, nor did I claim otherwise.

why on earth would you take a malicious site and post a link to it on a public forum? So more people will click on it?

P5-133XL wrote:

why on earth would you take a malicious site and post a link to it on a public forum? So more people will click on it?

Now that, my friend, is a sensible question that I had not considered.

If you get such texts I would suggest signing up for the donotcall registry, it may or may not help. It really depends on if the people running the operation are semi-legit or not.

https://www.donotcall.gov/

As far as phones go, I ended up switching off my families family plan to my own service and I have platinumtel. Which is a really minimalistic company, but for someone who doesn't use a cellphone often they have almost no tripwires to get nom your minutes and fair rates. Their tech support from what I hear is almost non-existant, but they operate off of the Sprint network, they're actually a subsidiary of Sprint.

I looked at a lot of pay as you go packages and they usually have BS in the fine print, Trachphone really tries to get you on their package deals and how they deal with minutes. They don't even have up front costs on their SMS messaging. Your minutes also expire with pay as you go plans for a lot of other carriers, in addition to having service days. If you really wanted to it's possible to have a cell phone through platinumtel for $40 for a year as long as you don't use up your minutes. They're the only carrier I've found that offers data services when you aren't on a monthly plan, which is awesome if you have a android phone and gvoice or skype. $.10 per MB.

They also give you your service codes to unlock your phone you get through the mail, so the phone is essentially unlocked to begin with. I personally rather go with a GSM carrier, but there haven't been any that have been remotely close to how good ptel is.

OP - don't click on this type of non-sense, you're just wasting time.

P5-133XL wrote:

why on earth would you take a malicious site and post a link to it on a public forum? So more people will click on it?

1) The root site isn't malicious, the redirect after you "enter your code" is the malicious site.
2) I didn't post it as a hyperlink. The forum code automatically converted it.
3) Posting the URL ensures that it gets associated with the criticisms posted here, so anyone else who gets the spam and then tries to Google it will have one more reference available.

ShadowEyez wrote:

OP - don't click on this type of non-sense, you're just wasting time.

Too late, I already clicked.

Some of my friends have now gotten the same thing, so at this point, it's quite obviously a trap. It wasn't at the time.

I just want to bring some closure to my previous hijack of this thread. My wife and I jumped to the $30 T-mo plan. I bought a couple of nice used phones on Amazon - Galaxy S 4G for her, which runs Gingerbread, LG G2x for me which got a second GB update like 2 weeks before I got the phone (OTA updates are pretty sweet), and we're both super-impressed. Good reception even at my parents' rural house and my relatively rural worksite, and pretty strong internet connections as well. It's not 3G at those rural locations but there's wifi if I really need it, and 2G if I'm desperate still works. My aversion to commitment made me pay around $325 up front for the phones, but paying $60 monthly for the privilege definitely makes up for it.

And thanks to GrooVeIP Pro and Google Voice, the outgoing calls made via Google Voice (at the very least) are free, and if people with cell phones that don't pay by the minute for long distance will use it, those incoming calls don't count either.. Unfortunately we don't live in an area code where Google Voice would allow us to port in our numbers so we had to take those to T-Mo. However, thanks to the pre-paid nature of our phones we can eventually port to GV when they DO support it in my area and nobody will have to worry about getting a new phone number.

So, uh, yeah. Pretty stoked.

Ars had an interesting article about this a few days ago.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06 ... cord-high/

People are getting pissed off with the big carriers fees and hidden costs etc, so many are switching to prepaid phones or smaller companies that piggy-back on the big carriers' infrastructure and offer better rates. I still like pay as you go tbh, I remember the days when you were considered rich as **** if you had a phone "on contract". That only really started changing with the Iphone.