TracFone

TracFone is an Analog Cellular reseller that sells service on a prepaid basis, i.e. you purchase the phone and a card that gives you a certain number of minutes, and then you have to purchase an extra card (sold at convenience stores) every so often to add a specified number of minutes listed on the card. Even if you have plenty of minutes, your minutes will expire if you do not purchase a card before the expiration date in order to extend your service.

TracFone currently sells the Nokia 918 and 252C Analog Phones.

I seriously advise against purchasing phones and service from this company. When I purchased a phone and minutes from TracFone, I was told to input an excessively long string of numbers into my phone, and then wait 24 hours. Twenty four hours later, the phone didn't work, so I called their tech support, who proceeded to "reprogram" the phone, which involved entering another stream of digits, and then tell me to wait 24 more hours for the phone to be activated. Anyway the phone still didn't work two days later, so I called again and was told that the reason my phone didn't work was that the numbers that they had assigned me were already assigned to other customers and as such my phone was not being allowed onto the network! Apparently the software that TracFone is running doesn't consider "no numbers available to be assigned" to be an error condition worthy of a warning, and just goes ahead and displays to the rep a number which has already been assigned. Even after being told this, and being assigned another number, the phone still didn't work! Eventually the tech rep said that he would "call line management" and try to get some additional numbers in my area. It took me two weeks until my phone worked. Fortunately, one tech along the way added 30 minutes to my account because of all the trouble I had.

The moral of my sad story is this: Never order service from TracFone ever ever ever!

As of 2022, Tracfone is still in business and is a large mobile telephone provider in the United States. Their business model is still based around no-contract, pay-as-you-go service. Tracfone is currently owned by Verizon, a company whose main business is smartphone sales and service. Tracfone plans include both prepaid smartphone and feature phone service. It is a budget service, and seems to be geared towards people who either don't have the means or the desire to use a "smart phone", including many senior citizens who want a less complicated phone.

I myself have a Tracfone. After I returned from Latin America, where smart phone contracts were cheap and necessary for my lifestyle, I realized that most phone plans in the US were at least four times more expensive than what I was used to, and required a contract. But I needed an American phone number for certain things, and I wanted to have a phone in emergency, so I bought an Alcatel flip phone for around 30 dollars, and pay about that much every three months to have phone service, including text messaging. My feature phone does have internet, which is hard to navigate but can be used in emergencies. In general, I consider my Tracfone service, which works out to a little over a quarter a day, to be a good backup in case I am stuck somewhere and really need to make a phone call. While I can't say that Tracfone is the most stellar company, it has done what I needed without problem.