Cell Phone Advisor

Calling in Circles
By Allan Keiter

The newest wireless plan benefit is not all it is cracked up to be.

T-Mobile launched its “myFaves” series of rate plans last month, making it the first national wireless carrier to jump on the “calling circles” bandwagon. The regional carrier Alltel has been aggressively promoting “My Circle”, and it is also available from Suncom.

The basic premise of these calling circles is that a subscriber can designate some set of numbers (usually 5 or 10), and make unlimited calls to those numbers, without using up any airtime minutes.  It is like mobile-to-mobile, except the calling circle numbers need not be wireless lines, nor do they have to be limited to subscribers of the offering carrier.

Sounds like a pretty good deal, right?  All else equal, it would be.  However, when the curtain is pulled back, there isn’t much benefit for most people.  That’s because there is always a cost associated with these plans:

1. T-Mobile has a set of myFaves plans that offer far fewer minutes for the same price than their regular rate plans while eliminating across-the-board unlimited mobile-to-mobile on the myFaves family plans

1. Alltel only offers the feature on rate plans that are $59.99 and higher

1. Suncom charges $10 to $15 per month for the feature

It isn’t particularly easy for someone to figure out if this feature is beneficial for them. However, for most people it won’t be, because of the large bucket of anytime minutes in most rate plans as well as the existing plan benefits (e.g., free nights and weekends and/or free mobile-to-mobile) that already limit the use of plan minutes to just weekdays. Unless you are incurring overage charges each month on your current plan, this is one circle you probably don’t need to belong to.

Allan Keiter is president of MyRatePlan.com. Founded in 1999, MyRatePlan offers unbiased content, filters and calculators to help consumers make more informed decisions about the products and services they research and buy online.