Tello Mobile

With the unfortunate shutdown of our previous provider Boss Wireless looming ahead, I used this website to find our next phone provider. Tello came in at the top for us, as everyone gets the same low plan prices and everyone gets their own plan, no matter how many lines we want to manage under one account or how many individual family members want to manage their own accounts. Better for us is that they offer the monthly prices we would have to pay other MVNO’s for 6 months to a year up front to get, but we only pay Tello monthly. Some may see this as not getting a multi-line or multi-month discount, but what Tello really does here is not penalize individuals, low-income families who are not able to afford annual bills or anyone who does not want to take the chance that their chosen phone service provider will slam its flip phone shut 5 months after they made an up-front payment for a year. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Mint Mobile, who made this annual pricing popular by use of a celebrity spokesperson, but just got purchased by T-Mobile, still shows annual pricing on its website that excludes all additional fees they add on at the end of the bill, and now includes a large degree of uncertainty about its future, even 6 months from now. Also, although Tello doesn’t include every tax and fee in the price, they are really easy on the wallet when it comes to adding tax at the end. Real intelligible English speaking human customer service that is available 24/7 also helps. I did need to talk to them a few times, mostly with questions, but also once to fix an issue with wifi calling that was discovered to be an oversight on my part, something I forgot to set in our dashboard. Every time I spoke with someone, I heard a human voice that I could understand very well, even though one or two I could tell spoke English as their second language. I mean to say that although English is not everyone’s first language, Tello’s support, at least everyone I spoke with, speaks and understands it fluently and is not just reading a script. They also are courteous and knowledgeable of their products and services, which is also lacking in many customer service call centers these days. Most of my experiences with their customer service came from calls I made on a Sunday evening, as late as 10:30 at night, not to mention the call I had to make at near 11 o’clock on a Tuesday night, and in every case, I found their humans to be very courteous and helpful. I did see a complaint somewhere where someone didn’t like having to create an account to get the total price of their phone service plan. This was my first customer service call actually, on a Sunday evening. The agent I spoke with, again very courteous and knowledgeable, calculated my tax rate with just a zip code and told me to the penny the total price of the two rate plans we were interested in right over the phone. We were not surprised when we did get our account and activate our lines, thanks to humans who understand and actually do seem to care.

Having been with Tello only for a few days, I really can’t say too much about long-term stability and reliability. That said, because our previous provider is to shut down and one of our lines was coming due, we had to purchase our Sim kits on Amazon, which got them to us much faster than having them sent through the mail, even faster than the $5 priority mail Tello offers on the website. Our SIMs did come as a 3-in-one pop-out style that seems to be the common way of selling them these days. We were able to activate them with little trouble, although there is a bug in their human verification system that allows selecting images on the computer where I started the process, but won’t let me hear the audio version that works with my screen reader, choosing instead to show me an error message indicating that my computer is sending automated queries to their servers. This was one of those times when I needed their human customer service, which although they could not solve my problem over the phone, told me to try it on a cell phone, which worked perfectly on the same wi-fi network. Once I got past that bug though, activation was very smooth, and the porting of our numbers went even faster than expected, taking nearly 1 minute each time. Except for the early wi-fi calling issue, our service has been flawless for the first 3 days, and I’m not expecting any trouble, since they use T-Mobile’s network, which has always struck the best overall balance between reliability and device compatibility in our area.

The only improvement I want to see now is the inclusion of all the taxes and fees in the advertised price. Here where we live, the taxes they do add on are less than a dollar, but still, I prefer to see it up front rather than having to call customer service or set up an account and enter in all my billing info and calculate an extra charge after seeing the plan price. Our previous provider seems to have been a trend setter in this regard, as I have seen I believe two to three other MVNO’s do it in the past year. Still, when it comes to the total price, Tello actually beat out everyone for what we needed, a no-nonsense plan that includes bells and whistles and all the data we need, and no penalty because we don’t have a large number of lines managed under the same account and want to pay monthly, and even with the added taxes and fees, they managed to cut our bill nearly in half. As I said, I can’t comment about anything long-term, but we do seem to be getting service that is on par with other providers we have tried, only at a much lower price, and the customer service is nearly unbeatable. Now just fix the advertised plan pricing so that it includes everything on the front page, $14 should mean $14 charged to the card on file, or just make the advertised price $15, and we’ll all be happy as clams as they say.

Final thought, please update this article to mention that Tello sells their SIM kits through Amazon, not just through their website, confirmed through customer service and by our purchases, and that we need a Tello SIM kit, not Sprint, which has been officially dead for some time now.