Some of our Northern Nevada AT&T legacy GSM customers are happy with their existing plans, and because they are on the GSM network their service is not affected by the loss of old TDMA cellular towers. However, many legacy customers have phones on the fritz and upgrading to a new handset would mean losing their promotional AT&T rate plan. So many of you have been asking me, "how do we get around this?" Well there is a way, but I must warn any of you who take these steps they are at your own risk and we are not responsible for phones that may not work with old AT&T legacy SIM cards. The solution is buying an un-locked GSM phone. This can be done through ebay, which is the most risky way to go about it, or you can purchase unlocked phones through myworldphone.com. When purchasing an unlocked phone for the U.S. make sure that be phone is a quad band for best performance. Many of the unlocked phones that you will find will be tri-band, meaning they lack one of the cellular frequencies used in the U.S. This being either 1900, or 850. The best way to get the most out of your service (i.e. rate plan, phone, and coverage) is to upgrade to a new "cingular" branded phone with rollover minutes. Older AT&T plans do not have rollover, and some do not even have mobile to mobile. The new handsets are also set to work with the cingular (AT&T) towers more efficiently than unlocked world phones from over seas. Thus improving battery performance, and easing access to the web and text messaging. So if you want to get the most out of the cingular (AT&T) network than go with a new company branded phone. However, for those of you savvy enough, there are other alternatives to gaining access with your old settings.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Ask the Experts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.