If you're looking at this guide you've undoubtedly heard of this fairly large company who lines store shelves with twenty-to-eighty-dollar pieces of plastic called Tracfones. Here's why they're worth that much, and more, and how they work...

First off, Tracfone doesn't own any cell towers. None. But they hae contracts with nearly every US provider under the sun to let them use their networks for Tracfones. As opposed to all other (and I mean ALL other; I've researched the subject thoroughly) prepaid carriers, which rent airtime from one carrier, or are the prepaid division of that carrier, and thus only have cheap access to that carrier's towers and just maybe the towers of a few other carriers.

So why is this so great? Because with Tracfone using Cingular you get the EXACT SAME coverage that you would on a Cingular contract plan. But without necessarily having to pay $50 a month ($39.99 plus $10.01 in taxes and junk fees) every month to Cingular. You just pick up some Tracfone airtime from wherever and add it to your phone and you're set.

That's the other thing about Trafones: all airtime is kept track of on the phone itself. This is the other thing, besides the contracts with a gazillion carriers, that lets their phones roam seamlessly between one carrier and another. On CDMA phones like the Nokia 2126 (my parents both have them and like them; I'm 15 but don't use more than 100 minutes a month, all on prepaid) roaming costs twice as much as home-area calling, but it works like a charm and works everywhere. On GSM, aka SingleRate, if your phone can get a signal it will charge one "unit" per minute, whether it's on Cingular, T-Mobile or anything in between. Which is really sweet if you ask me.

Because, if you look in the right places, airtime can be dirt cheap for Tracfones.

You can go into your local whatever-mart and get a $20 airtime card good for 60 days and 60 minutes of service...or you can go onto eBay or similar and get more than double that amount of minutes for less money. Why? Pardon me eBay sellers, but the key word here is Tracfone refer-a-friend.

You see, Tracfone has an ongoing promotion that if you have a friend that is getting a Tracfone, to push them over the edge to get them one you can get them $30 worth of minutes on their new phone...free. And on the old phone too...free. In this case, there are 120 minutes awarded, on both ends. And new phones can be had for as little as $20 via Tracfone's website, complete with extra airtime cards too! And on top of that promotional codes (as of this writing 38094 adds 60 minutes) get you even more minutes! 'nuff said.

Hope this helps everyone. I'm going to put some Tarcfone airtime of my own up on eBay in the very near future, and trust me it will beat the socks, shoes and pants off the current offerings. So stay tunes. And while you're waiting, take a look at my website, which has great information like this...except lots more of it. At the risk of getting at odds with eBay (for some reason Google has not indexed my new site yet; searching for go4prepaid results in my old site, which has not been updated in a week or so) this site is at www.go4prepaid.info

I hope this helps anyone looking to get a good deal on a cell phone and who uses less than 250 minutes a month.