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Leaving Straight Talk for AIO

I've heard about them, thanks for the info, their prices are better then some companies.

I'd pay more with them, but if others can save money that's great!
 
UPDATE - now that ST offers LTE and AIO cant port a ST number online or over the phone, looks like I'm stuck with ST, which I had to order a newer sim for LTE to work, and so far the data has been a little better as far as hangups and speed, I dont have LTE in my area.


Thought I'd give a brief match-up of the two companies for differences on their main plans, they do offer other plans and services that are not discussed here, also there are parts and details of each service that I have not listed or talk about, but will try to update them as time goes on.

Both Companies -
-Prepaid - no contract, Unlimited Talk Text MMS, Bring your own phone (by their sim) or purchase a phone from them, Port your number to their company or be provided with a new one, Contracts state no tethering allowed



AIO WIRELESS

Highlights

ATT Company

Works with ATT or unlocked phones
Runs on ATT network including LTE - Capped at 7-8 Mbps
Few Select AIO Stores in certain markets
3rd month service free for new customers if you sign up by 9-29-13
Live Chat Support
$10 Sim Cards

Plans Per Month -

$40 - 250 MB - Basic - Basic Phones
$55 - 2 GB - Smart - Basic or Smartphones
$70 - 7 GB - Pro - Basic or Smartphones

Add 1 GB per month for $10
Add International for $10

$15 - 250 MB - Tablet - Tablets only (can not confirm if this plan includes unlimited data)

All Voice Plans Include -
-High speed data for plan allotment including LTE where available
-Unlimited but throttled data after allowance reached
-Voicemail, Visual Voicemail (they provide their own app), Call Waiting/Forwarding, 3-Way Calling
-Monthly plan prices include all taxes and fees



STRAIGHT TALK

Highlights

Tracfone / Walmart Company

Works on major networks including att, t-mobile, verizon
Plan Cards can be purchased in Walmart stores
$15 Sim Cards

Plans Per 30 days

$45 - “Unlimted Mobile Web Access”
$60 - “Unlimted Mobile Web Access”, Unlimited International

Add Global Card for $10
Offers 3,6,12 month plans for a discounted rate
Offers Auto Refill

Includes -
-Voicemail, Call Waiting/Forwarding, 3-Way Calling

---
Alright that's what they state, now for my opinion and experieces with ST, I've been a ST customer for about
 
from what i read, both the aio lte and hspa speeds are partially reduced/throttled , before you get to the cap.


really? The comparable go phone plan at $60 is only $5 more, for faster lte and hspa speeds, as well as higher priority on the towers, i don't see any real advantage outside of one free month for aio over go phone. Plus, my go phone sim was free. How much of a cheapskate do you have to be? The $70 aio plan might be tempting for tablets.
 
mrnyjet said:
from what i read, both the aio lte and hspa speeds are partially reduced/throttled , before you get to the cap.


really? The comparable go phone plan at $60 is only $5 more, for faster lte and hspa speeds, as well as higher priority on the towers, i don't see any real advantage outside of one free month for aio over go phone. Plus, my go phone sim was free. How much of a cheapskate do you have to be? The $70 aio plan might be tempting for tablets.
Click to expand...

Yes AIO caps LTE data speeds at 7 - 8 Mbps
You may have a point about speeds but the majority of the time you would never notice a difference in times for downloading or loading webpages at the different provided speeds.
But you have to notice AIO offers unlimited data after your 2/7gb, unlike Gophone, and AIO does not offer the 7gb plan for tablets.
If you want to talk about being a cheapskate, why are you on prepaid and not on a national plan with att or verizon, and why are you making the point that your sim card was free if you are not one?
 
tbzj7 said:
Yes AIO caps LTE data speeds at 7 - 8 Mbps
You may have a point about speeds but the majority of the time you would never notice a difference in times for downloading or loading webpages at the different provided speeds.
But you have to notice AIO offers unlimited data after your 2/7gb, unlike Gophone, and AIO does not offer the 7gb plan for tablets.
If you want to talk about being a cheapskate, why are on prepaid and not on a national plan with att or verizon, and why are you making the point that your sim card was free if you are not one?
Click to expand...


being on prepaid means i am NOT locked in by any carrier. I can change phones and/or carriers any time i want. Plus, i save money over the long term over a contract. That is why carriers are losing postpaid customers while more and more people are moving to prepaid.
Those carriers would not be buying prepaid companies ( metro pcs, cricket, boost, virgin, and opening go smart and aio ) unless they want to acquire spectrum/ stem loss of customers.
frankly, the feds should ban carriers from selling phones, and put an end to the hidden subsidy/contract nonsense once and forever.
aio charges $10 for a sim card? Pure nonsense.
 
AIO is a subsidiary of AT&T.

I will probably be following. Lost MMS earlier this month, took a while to get it back. Just lost data today....i'm pissed.
 
Since this discussion I have been seeing the banners up here on the road in South Florida, pushing AIO. Might have to check it out, as I am going to switch the wife's line when her contract expires. I was thinking of Solavei, or TM, I may have to follow this thread until then and see. ;)
 
OK, since we created a AIO section I moved it here for it's first post and so others can follow the thread.
 
Thanks, I've just checked and I still can not order anything for my area, looks like it will be towards the middle of the month before they roll it out to the rest of the u.s.
 
K, keep us posted. I did check their site and enter my zip code and looks like I can order here in South Florida, but I am not ready until the end of October anyways, I hope others post here so we can get more feedback on the service and support.
 
"It's Here" Reads their webpage now, now open to all us customers, my straight talk plan does not run out until the middle of the month so I'm debating on when to do the switch
 
Update, a couple of days ago i tried to enter my straight talk information to port over and it would not go through, after trying to figure this out, finally a customer service rep told me just today that they cannot port over numbers at this time from companies that do not use pins for their accounts, like straight talk. So my only hope is that they get this working before the promotion is up. Nice... so hopefully soon
 
Not a fan of the LTE speed cap, but that's about what I average with Sprint so I'm a bit torn. I'll be giving AIO a solid look when my contract is up in June.
 
Looks like they still cannot port numbers over from straight talk online, so since straight talk now supports lte i bought a newer sim card with the tfdata apn settings and swapped to that, data seems faster and the quality seems better all together, still no lte in my area yet but speed test last night on hspa+ came up 172 ping, 9.72 down, 1.50 up, faster down and ping than and test on aio, and since they have an lte cap of 8.... will be testing still to see how well the data is and LTE, may not be making the switch after all if things are as good as they look now with straight talk
 
OK, so you are still on ST, and not switching AIO, was curious to hear about the service and speeds, maybe someone else will chime in and let us know
 
A little info about AIO from someone who switched over 4-5 months ago. Since we were early to switch over we had some issues but they were fixed.

My wife and I both have Nexus 4s and she switched literally the second day they were open here. Took quite a bit of doing, but T-Mo service was horrible where we lived and where we traveled. Porting from T-Mo was not an issue, and we were up and running very quickly. Going from horrible signal strength with T-Mo to great signal on AIO probably will make this review sound better than it really was, but it was just nice for her to be able to make and receive calls consistently.

I wanted to port my number over from Google Voice and they were unable to do it...so I ported my number first to T-Mobile for the cost of a sim card and about 5 dollars in pay-as-you-go minutes, then ported to AIO with no issues.

Bottom line, I love AIO...have not had to call customer service since the nationwide rollout but I assume they are taking more time to respond now. If you have a more technical issue the normal customer service folks are very nice, but have no idea how to fix it - so we had to escalate our issues to a different level, which is hard to get to.

PROS

Great call and data quality. Never have had any issues
Price, of course
AT&T Network
Have never noticed any throttling or delays due to capped speeds. In my opinion I can't tell any difference in normal usage...still better than Sprint's 4G I had before moving to T-Mo

CONS

Online billing sometimes has glitches - signed up for autopay and service got cut off twice at the end of the month, but was able to go online and reactivate without a problem
No short code texting - For example "text a word to 12345" to win something. Doesn't work with AIO right now, but they are working on it according to the last update I saw from them - more annoying than anything, but if you send or receive texts from services such as that they do NOT go through.

Hope this helps someone make a decision and also to help get numbers ported.
 
I'm considering leaving Verizon, been with them since they were Bell Atlantic Mobile, for a non-contract carrier such as AIO or ST. I'm having trouble deciding between the two. It seems that ST is still the better deal being that they give you another 500MB of data on the Smart plan than AIO does before you're throttled and it's $10/mo cheaper. Since both now offer LTE, I just can't see a reason to spend $10 more a month for less data. Anyone that is using AIO/ST care to comment?
 
Well I can't speak for ST, but I did switch the wife from Sprint to AIO, and she loves it, her data service is much better than mine and also her cell phone coverage also. Dealing with AIO customer service was OK, they are still ironing out the glitches, but in time they will get it. Data speeds so far on her phone have been very consistent in the 5 to 10 meg range. Also the $55 plan is taxes all included, not sure about ST.

I also considered her for ST, but from reading about others having issues with their customer service, I decided to give AIO a crack. If you need anymore info let me know. FTR I am switching to AIO as soon as my contract with Sprint is up, and I have been with Nextel/Sprint for about 15 Years. ;)
 
rayfin said:
I'm considering leaving Verizon, been with them since they were Bell Atlantic Mobile, for a non-contract carrier such as AIO or ST. I'm having trouble deciding between the two. It seems that ST is still the better deal being that they give you another 500MB of data on the Smart plan than AIO does before you're throttled and it's $10/mo cheaper. Since both now offer LTE, I just can't see a reason to spend $10 more a month for less data. Anyone that is using AIO/ST care to comment?
Click to expand...
Both St and AIO will be running on att network, St of course does offer t mobile sims but we are not talking about that.
So call quality will be identical.
Personally I would go with the $45 straight talk, faster LTE speeds, they dont throttle it to 8 like AIO claims to. The $45 is before sales tax but all fcc and regulatory fees are included.

DonB said:
Well I can't speak for ST, but I did switch the wife from Sprint to AIO, and she loves it, her data service is much better than mine and also her cell phone coverage also. Dealing with AIO customer service was OK, they are still ironing out the glitches, but in time they will get it. Data speeds so far on her phone have been very consistent in the 5 to 10 meg range. Also the $55 plan is taxes all included, not sure about ST.

I also considered her for ST, but from reading about others having issues with their customer service, I decided to give AIO a crack. If you need anymore info let me know. FTR I am switching to AIO as soon as my contract with Sprint is up, and I have been with Nextel/Sprint for about 15 Years. ;)
Click to expand...

I know if you buy a straight talk $45 refill from your local walmart you end up spending $48.15 here in Jacksonville, if your sales tax is higher, or lower that price will change.
I also know you can usually buy them online with no sales tax so your looking at $45 or even cheaper if they have discounted ones.

Plus you can usually buy 3 and 6 month cards for discounted rates. get a 6 month card and pay about 36 per month.
 
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