I used to have Virgin Mobile but found that my infrequent use of the phone was costing me as much as a standard cell plan with free nights/weekends.

When I had it the cost was .25 per minute for the first 10 min of calls per day then .10 per minute after. This charge was applied to incoming and outgoing calls..so if my wife called to say "when will you be home?" and the call was ended within 30 seconds it still cost .25. Now we've got a Verizon family plan and it works for us.

CSR's opinion nonwithstanding, the phone's call timer could begin counting at connection, while the Virgin billing timer could begin as soon as you hit the send button? That could explain the extra 10-15 seconds... then Virgin just rounds up anything over 1:00 to be 2m?

I had a similar issue with Cellular One back in the late 90s CDMA frontier.

is this on a pay per use plan? because a lot of those charge a 'connection' fee which is usually one extra minute per call. so a 45 second call would be two minutes. or a 4:46 call would be 6 minutes.

Things like this remind me of that worm in the movie Hackers, stealing little bits of money for some looser on a skateboard.

It's just a little consumer fraud. That's not bad, right?

I'm thinking Jconli is on to something there with the phone differentiating from Virgin's method of billing. I use one of these, and I love it. I've always felt cell phones ought to be for emergency use only, not as an electronic leash. Since I have a bit of money on it, I can use it to call my buddy long distance and I don't have a long-distance plan on my land line. The other nice thing is a quick call is a quarter, that's cheaper than the half buck if you can find a payphone.

My wife has one of these phones and this concerns me. The main reason she got thru Virgin was price, but if she's actually paing for twice the minutes (most of her calls are short, the price advantage evaporates.

Perhaps someone could use a stopwatch, timing from the "send" press, to the "end" press, and compare the observed time to the reported time of the call.

I forgot to mention when I submitted this that these were INBOUND calls. I did not include outgoing calls because of the time spent ringing would skew the talk time recorded on my phone.

My plan does not charge any connection or daily fees of any kind. I pay 18 cents per minute I talk and that's it.

Seems like a good time to bring in a class-action lawyer! Think of the aggregate value of those minutes customers were overcharged for ....

I came here to post pretty much exactly what jconli1 said. Some CDMA phones start their timers at the time you connect to the tower, while others start the timer when the other party picks up the phone. I'd imagine that this phone is uses the latter method, while VMU charges from the initial connection.

Regarding this affecting inbound calls, it could be the same situation. When your cell phone rings, you're phone is actually fully connected to the tower, as if you were currently on the call, waiting for you to hit the TALK button to patch in the caller. Perhaps VMU charges for that time, too.

I know it's petty, but the only type of companies worse that cell phone providers are pre-paid cell phone providers.

What jconli1 & CBragg said.

I checked with a pal who works at Virgin Mobile Canada, and yes, they definitely start charging when 'send' is pressed. However, it's not by choice - Virgin has no built-out networks in N.America and has to lease from other carriers. Apparently Bell charges them when the send button is pressed so they do the same.

branson do you really need anymore money, you greedy bastard. when is enough money enough? you own your own freakin island and have more money than you can ever use, so how about rounding it down a minute instead and you'll actually get people to sign up in droves, because virgin mobile is a consumer friendly cell phone company... holy shit what a concept!

Yeah, what is happening is that you're being charged for paging time too. CDMA technology uses slot-cycling, so your phone can be idle for up to 6 seconds before it realizes it has a call coming in. Then after that, you're probably being charged for all of the time until you actually ANSWER the call....

US Virgin Mobile is a Sprint MVNO. So, maybe Sprint charges them this way. I doubt it, though. Every service provider SAYS they can charge you for paging and other network chatter, but I don't know of any (other than VM, apparently) that do.

[quote]branson do you really need anymore money, you greedy bastard. when is enough money enough? you own your own freakin island and have more money than you can ever use, so how about rounding it down a minute instead and you'll actually get people to sign up in droves, because virgin mobile is a consumer friendly cell phone company... holy shit what a concept![/quote]

Most business's, especially Virgin, are in the business to make lots of money, not to be a friend of the consumer, or to help dead beats with no credit, who can't get a real cell phone, it's not setup to reward poor people or people with shitty credit.

Ahem...my family uses 2 Virgin phones and we are neither poor nor deadbeats. It's an easy way for me to control my son's cell phone expenses. I still pay less than I would for a family plan from another provider, and I didn't have to sign a service commitment. These were big pluses for me.

The posts regarding billing when the phones are 'active' are most likely correct, though I haven't researched it. I pay on average $50/month for minutes for both phones combined, and the phones cost less than $40 each. They're basic phones, but we didn't need web access or the ability to take photos. Laptops and Palm Pilots take care of these for us.

Anyway, I'm heading into my 4th year as a Virgin customer with no complaints.

meh, I still like their commercials the best out of the big three.

and @AlteredBeast: its just fractions of pennies from the dish, not the jar (from Office Space as well as Hackers)

Cell phones are a scam, of course. Altho its almost as easy for you to screw them as it is vice versa

I'm on the same plan, so I made a test call, 50 seconds long from the time I picked up, and it did bill me at 2 minutes. I can't tell, though, whether that's rounding up from 45 seconds +, or from the initial connection, which was over a minute.

DAGNABBIT. I SPENT THIRTY-SIX CENTS ON THAT EXPERIMENT! I really should have thought it through before I went throwing my money around like that.

Most business's, especially Virgin, are in the business to make lots of money, not to be a friend of the consumer, or to help dead beats with no credit, who can't get a real cell phone, it's not setup to reward poor people or people with shitty credit.

You sound like an excellent mark for lifestyle advertising. Do you always make irrational purchasing decisions in an attempt to bolster your self-image and your social standing? And do you always project your own insecurities onto others?

I use Virgin prepaid, even though I have plenty of money and credit, and I'm sure I'd be eligible for any cell phone plan I'd like. I've had a cell phone since 1993, and I've always made a point to use the plan that best fits my usage patterns.

I have three other extended family members and several friends on the same plan, and none of them fit that bill either. We're not poor. We just know how to do math, and a high per-minute, low-minimum prepaid account is usually the best all-around deal for those who use their cell phones for emergencies and the occasional convenience.

So, we're not poor, and we're not deadbeats. We're just not stupid. I can see where you might get confused, though.

I got a vm phone to use only for emergency use. At one point I slipped into the habit of using it regularly and it ends up costing more than a regular plan. The customer service will make you want to slit your own throat. One time I had the monthly plan and moved into an area where my phone didn't get incoming calls and hung up 40 seconds into outgoing ones. I tried to get a refund and the customer service people all kept looking up my zip code and telling me I was in a coveage area and my phone should work and having me remove the battery and press buttons and all kinds of bs. Eventually I had to talk to a manger, she yelled at me and told me it's my fault for moving out of a coverage area. I told her several customer service people looked it up already and I was and she could look it up right now. She responded by yelling at me "we're not giving you a refund ever so you might as well give up" and hung up on me. VM is leading the trend of using annoying robots, and hiring people who are dumber than the robots to frustrate you into not calling them in the first place.

Also I bought the phone originally because I was poor. VM is obviously for 13 year old girls. If you aren't a 13 year old girl and call them up they're gonna be pissed that they're expected to give you assistance or explanations beyond what a 13 year old girl would expect.