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For many industries the fourth quarter is considered to be one of the most profitable times of the year. For the cell phone industry, this is no exception. For whatever reason, the Christmas season is when a lot of people are ending their 2 year cell phone contracts and are looking to switch carriers. Because AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile all want to steal customers away from each other, they will likely be adding all sorts of deals to potential buyers. T-Mobile capitalized on this fact and is thus far the first of the major carriers to offer some very significant discounts on their cell phone plans.
T-Mobile isn’t the biggest carrier around, but it is generally considered to be one of the cheapest. A recent Consumer Reports study found that customer service was slightly better at Verizon, but you pay a significant premium for that service. It’s a bit of a compromise; you get a great price for your service and reasonable customer service.

The company is currently offering 1,500 peak minutes for just $39.00 a month. A year and a half ago I entered a contract with Alltel that was $39.00 a month for just 500 minutes a month! For an additional $10.00 a month, T-Mobile will provide you with 1,500 peak minutes and unlimited calling after 9:00 PM and on weekends. This deal likely won’t be around for long, so if you’re thinking about getting a new cell-phone plan, the Christmas season is definitely the time to do it.

If you want to have your free nights and weekends calling start earlier in the evening, there’s a little trick you can use to get your free hours to start as much as three hours earlier. If you live on the Pacific or Mountain time-zones and know someone on the eastern seaboard, you can register or a cell-phone plan, have the phone sent to the person who lives on the east coast. You’ll get a number for whatever locality that person is in, but your nights and weekends will be based off Eastern Standard Time. So if you live in California and your phone is an east coast phone, your nights and weekends minutes will start at 6:00 PM! The one caveat with this is that you need to make sure that you aren’t in a plan that will charge you a bundle if you’re outside your specified plan. Get a nation-wide calling plan with your cell-phone to prevent this from happening.



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