My brother’s school is no longer offering phone service in the dorms, so he needs a cell phone. My parents have a pay-as-you-go phone that they share amongst themselves or which ever of the still-living-at-home family happens to be traveling. And I have a regular old, run of the mill cell phone. My sister would like a cell phone, but she’s been too polite and practical to say so. And others in my family have their own plans, too. Put this all together and that equals a whole lot of cell phones. Why not all get onto one plan and split the cost?
And so that’s what we’re doing. Today, I ordered a bunch of additional lines on my account. Later this week, once those phones arrive and get activated, we’ll bundle all the phones onto a family plan. And then we’ll have to figure out who pays and how much.
But you know what? I’m almost as excited about this as I was when I bought my own phone way back when. My siblings will be easily reachable! My parents will have a phone no matter how many people are traveling to different places. We’ll all be able to talk to each other for “free.” And I be shelling out less per month than I do on my current run-o-the-mill minimalist plan.
For anyone else thinking of doing this, though, it took a lot of phone calls to AT&T to figure out exacty what to do, so here are the steps.
- Order additional lines on your current account (select the family plan as the one that will govern these new lines).
- Receive and activate the phones.
- Call AT&T to have your current phone added to the familiy plan. At this point I’ll also check to make sure we’re all on the same area code and have them put us all together if we’re not. They’ve assured me this is no problem.
There should be no termination fees or anything, and I get to keep my old phone number and some of my accumulated roll-over minutes (equal to the number of monthly minutes in the new family plan). All in all the only things that would make this process nicer is if there weren’t those pesky activation fees on each phone, and if it didn’t freak out their computers that I asked for the phones to be sent to an address other than my own. At least the second one got cleared up with a minimum of fuss and only a slight delay in processing time. Now, if we could just work on the first… But I suppose that’s wishful thinking.