ETF, Smart Talk and 2 iPhone 5's?

[lthompson]

My wife went in to work this morning and was told that there may be layoffs and cut backs coming in Oct. This is bad timing as our daughter just started college. She and I upgraded to the 5. If her job is affected we will need to cut back on our spending and one place that would make sense is our cell contract with AT&T. That being said I have a few questions:

If we chose to cancel our contract with AT&T, would there be one ETF or would there be one for each line? (We are on the family plan and have four phones, three being iPhones)

Would we have to return the iPhone 5's that we just received?

We would save around $90 a month going with ST. I know from reading on here it will work with all our phones. Would this be our cheapest route if we want to keep data?

 

[lthompson]

Bringing this back up hoping someone might be able to answer some of the questions.

 

[blevins321]

Yeah, you'd owe the ETF for all the lines that you haven't fulfilled the 2 years for since upgrade or activation. Note that I said 2 years..not the 18-month upgrade window. Your contract is actually 6 months longer than the activation time.

I'd return the 2 5's and have the reverse your contract to what it was before. At that point, you might be able to cancel without penalty.

 

[nburwell]

I would take blevins321 suggestion and try to return both i5's and see if they will reverse your upgrade. The iPhone 5 will not work with ST (yet) so if you terminated your AT&T contract and didn't return the phones, they wouldn't be much use to you (unless you sold them).

 

[lthompson]

Thanks for the replies. We'll find out Monday about her job but this morning she was told not to worry about it.

And if need be, I think we would be better off selling the phones and paying the ETF's.

 

[Surrylic]

I believe you can get your iPhone 5's to work on ST, but honestly it's a lot of trouble. There is no visual voicemail unless you adopt YouMail (which rules, and no prepaid carriers don't have VVM, that's not just a ST problem), MMS won't work until you do some crazy T-Mobile card swap nonsense, and you have to cut down your SIM card to be the nano-sim size dimensions.

I hope everything works out for you guys, and I think StraightTalk is a very smart move... but you should probably just wait until they offer Nano SIM cards. Plus that way MMS will (hopefully) work as well. Sorry!