Consumer Cellular is a long standing provider in the wireless space having been founded in 1995. The company boasts of having over 2 million subscribers with roughly 1,000 employees ((source: Wikipedia)). Most recently the MVNO was named number 1 overall in customer satisfaction by both a Consumer Reports survey, and by J.D Power. Last summer they received similar accolades from a Market Force study.
Consumer Cellular operates mainly as an AT&T MVNO although occasionally the company is known to send out T-Mobile SIM cards to its subscribers. All of their phone plans are offered contract free but on a postpaid basis as opposed to prepaid.
If you've been researching Consumer Cellular to be your next phone service provider, you'll be happy to know that now through May 15th, 2017 you can signup for service with them and get your first month for free. Consumer Cellular says all you have to do is pick the plan you want, with as many lines as you want and they'll pick up the cost.
Consumer Cellular offers phone plans that have a build your own plan aspect to them. Instead of selling talk, text and data bundled together, subscribers get to pick how many minutes they need, and then pair that to various allotments of text bundled together with data.
A summary of their plan offerings is below:
Consumer Cellular Talk Plans
- $10/month - billed per minute. 25¢ per minute
- $15/month - 250 minutes
- $20/month - 1,500 minutes
- $30/month - unlimited minutes
Consumer Cellular Data and Text Bundles
- $2.50 - 300 texts, 30 MB data
- $5 - 2,000 texts, 200 MB data
- $10 - unlimited texts, 500 MB data
- $20 - unlimited texts, 1.5 GB data
- $30 - unlimited texts, 3 GB data
- $40 - unlimited texts, 5 GB data
So, as mentioned, if you want a plan from Consumer Cellular, you have a limited ability to build your own plan. For instance, for $20/month you could build a plan that contains 250 minutes ($15 talk plan) with 2,000 texts and 200 MB of data ($5 data and text bundle add on).
Family plan options are also available, where a subscriber can add another member to their plan for just $10/month. However, the second line and beyond share the talk, text and data units that line 1 is subscribed to.
Consumer Cellular's plans do not include taxes and fees, they are in addition to the prices listed above. They do not charge overages either, if a member were to go over their alloted units, they will simply be bumped up to the next plan tier.
Analysis
I'm not particularly impressed with Consumer Cellular's prices, however with over 2 million subscribers and the fact that they consistently rank tops in customer satisfaction, this isn't a complaint that everyone shares. For those of you who place more importance on price, you may find Cricket Wireless or H2O Wireless, or one of the other providers in the Cheapest Plans table to be of better value.