Pros: Low per-minute cost.
Cons: No- or intermittent text messaging, lousy Customer Service, horrible Tech Support, lots of dropped calls.
Summary: This review is, of course, only my opinion based on my family's experiences. In the spirit of fairness, your results may differ, and you should feel free to sign up with Boost if you think the problems I've experience could never happen to you. Just be aware that a poor choice can be costly.
Our household has four cell phones- used primarily for “emergency” and very casual use. We originally had service through our land line carrier, until we figured out what the per-minute charge was, and decided that a pre-paid, per-minute plan would work best for us.
For several years, we've used Virgin Mobile, but found that the signal strength was great everywhere EXCEPT at my oldest son's school due to the location of the cell towers. He could receive a signal outside the building, but not inside. (No lectures about cell phones in school, please. Remember, this is for emergency use and transportation to/from after-school activities.) My wife had a similar problem where she worked. Because of this (and ONLY because of this), we decided to switch two of the phones to Boost. It didn’t take long for our troubles to begin.
We found that the signal strength that concerned us with Virgin was no longer a problem. Dropped calls, however, were. In over six years of service with the two other carriers, we can count on one hand (OK, maybe two hands) the number of dropped calls we had with all four phones. Boost was a recurring problem. I've lost count of the number of times that I've tried to call the Boost phones, only to have the call dropped in mid-ring or mid-conversation, or to get a “not in service” message when I knew for a fact that the phone was turned on. It sometimes took a half dozen or more attempts until I was able to finally complete a connection. And getting credit for dropped calls? Check out their web site and see if you can find any mention of quality of service or dropped calls. Of course, you can ask Boost, and they'll tell you that this has more to do with local cell tower placement. Your actual performance may vary, depending on your location. Cleveland, Ohio, though, is not out in the sticks, and this should not be the major problem we found it to be.
Problem number two was receiving text messages- it didn't happen, or at least not consistently. Text messages MIGHT arrive- or they might not (and probably won’t). They might arrive a couple of days or even a week later- or they might not. Contacting Boost Customer Service via e-mail was less than useless; it sometimes took up to two weeks for them to respond. As a matter of fact, we're still waiting for an answer to our last e-mail from over a year and a half ago.
Calls to their Tech Service number were no better. They went so far as to “reset” our account three times without any improvement before they passed us off to Sprint (parent company), and the problem was “escalated to Level 5”. That’s apparently Boost-speak for “make the customer think we’re doing s
