Mobile Wireless Carrier in The United States

Selecting a good mobile wireless carrier here in the United States is not that easy. The system used in here is totally different with those on my country, Indonesia.

In Indonesia, 99 percent of mobile phone use prepaid SIM card and 'pay as you go' system. We can just buy a starter pack from one of wireless carrier (it includes SIM cards an a little amount of account balance). Then we can top-up our balance by purchasing a top-up card. When we use our phone for texting or calling, it automatically reduce our balance. If the balance runs out we can just top-up it again. It's a very simple system. If we don't like a wireless carrier, we can just throw our SIM card away and buy a new starter pack from another company.

In the United States, the system is totally different. We need to buy 'mobile plan' in order to use our phone. There are so many different plans offered by many wireless carrier companies that can make us confused on which plan is the best for our needs. Some plans include unlimited call and text, some other plans only provide limited call plan; some others give us unlimited data plans but some others need us to buy data plan separately. We also need to make a commitment or contract for at least one or two years for regular plan and at least one month plan for prepaid plan. It makes it is difficult to switch from one company to another company in case we realize later that our the plan we have purchased doesn't meet our needs.