Red Pocket Mobile has announced that it has partnered with eBay to offer anyone who purchases a phone through the e-commerce site the ability to bundle a plan with it. This will mark the first time that anyone who purchases a phone on eBay will have the option to add a wireless plan to it for as little as $5/month.
"Red Pocket Mobile is the natural partner for us to launch our add-on wireless plan,” said David Grim, Category Manager at eBay. He continued..."Because Red Pocket works on all of America’s major networks, their service can apply to virtually all of the millions of phones sold on eBay.”
Red Pocket Mobile and eBay will now be pushing five different Red Pocket Mobile plans with every phone view and purchase. One Red Pocket Mobile plan can now only be purchased when bundled with a phone.
The following phone plan options are now being sold as available add-ons to phone purchases:
- $29/month - unlimited talk, text and data with the first 5GB at 4G LTE data speeds on the GSMA (AT&T) network or 3GB of data if Sprint, T-Mobile or Verizon are chosen
- $60/annual plan - includes 100 minutes, 100 texts and 500MB of data per month, available for use on any of the 4 major wireless networks in the USA. Average cost is $5/month.
- $99/annual plan - includes 500 minutes, 500 texts and 500MB of data, available for use on any of the 4 major wireless networks. Average cost is $8.25/month.
- $199/annual plan - currently only available with phone purchase. Includes unlimited talk and text with 1GB of LTE data each month. Available for use on any network. Average cost is $16.58/month.
- $249/annual plan - includes unlimited talk, text and data with the first 2GB at 4G LTE data speeds. Works on any network. Average cost is $20.75/month.
All Red Pocket Mobile plans include free international calling that draws from the plans allotted minutes. The $60, $99, and $199 plans include hard capped data. If you run out of data in a month, that's all you get on those plans. Data speeds do not slow down for the remainder of the billing cycle. However, more data can be added to the plan if you run out for a small fee. Plans with limited minutes and texts can also get more minutes and text added mid billing cycle. Add on rates are priced as follows:
- $2 for 100 minutes OR 100 texts OR 100MB of 4G LTE data
- $5 for 250 minutes OR 500 texts OR 250MB of 4G LTE data
The talk, text and data add-ons do not roll over to the next month. So if you add them to your account mid-billing cycle and don't use them up by the end of the cycle, you'll lose them.
The plans that do include unlimited data will have their data speeds slowed to 64-128kbps once the plans high speed allotment gets used up.
||See also: My review of Red Pocket Mobile
I have one of those Red Pocket Mobile $60/360 days plans, and the only reason I didn’t run out of data last month while I was on vacation was that I switched my GSMA SIM card to a new phone just before we left on vacation, and hadn’t taken the time to set up mobile data properly — so I was WiFi-only for data until we got home. The talk and text buckets on the $60 plan are quite adequate for me, but I would feel much more comfortable with a larger data allotment. I plan to look for something along the lines of the $199 plan when the $60 plan expires, or something comparably priced from another MVNO without the hard-capped data restriction.