Best In Prepaid Wireless By lynnemg on Nov 01, 2009 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

I have used Tracfone Prepaid Wireless phone service for many years. After reviewing many other prepaid options, I found that Tracfone is the cheapest and easiest prepaid service to use. There are many options with Tracfone. You can pay for time as you need it by buying a prepaid card, buying from your phone, or pay monthly for a plan. There are a few plans to choose from, one being the family plan which allows you to pay one price each month for a specific number of minutes to each phone that is enrolled in the plan. This is a no contract plan that you can cancel at any time without having to worry about any additional fees.

Tracfone also allows you to upgrade your phone. You can purchase a new phone and have the ability to keep your current phone number and the minutes you have on your current phone. This process is easy to do and you are able to do it either by phone or on-line. You can then, if you want, reactivate the old phone with a new number. I do, however; highly recommend waiting at least a day between transactions. Recently, I attemtped to do both at the same time and had a bit of a problem.

Customer service is pretty good though. It does occassionally take a while to resolve the problem, as it did mine, but it did get resolved as quickly as possible. Customer service representatives all seem to be friendly and really do their best to help you. If one particular person cannot help, they will quickly direct you to someone who can help. In my case (mentioned above) it was quite late at night and I had to call back in the morning to talk to a supervisor to resolve the issue. )that is why I recommend only doing one transaction at a time)

With every product/service, there is generally a downside. Tracfone's downside is that they really do not have a lot of phone options. I have found that phone options vary from area to area. It took me over 6 months to find one that was newer than the one I previously used.

I have found that many prepaid services require a daily fee to keep your phone activated. Tracfone is not like this at all. You buy the phone, activate it, add time and evey time you add time to it, you remain activated for at least 30 additional days. The time you pay for is the time you are credited and you only lose time when you use your phone. This, in my opinion, makes Tracfone the cheapest and best prepaid service out there.