Any other Ringplus users?

[Shade00]

Republic Wireless and Ting get lots of love from this community, and rightly so. But for those of you who are satisfied with Sprint's coverage in your area, Ringplus may be worth a try. I have been on Verizon for years and paid the price because of it. I've stayed away from Sprint because I'd heard plenty of horror stories. As I've been trimming all the fat in my budget, I decided to try Sprint coverage. After doing some research, I concluded that Ringplus has some of the best value plans around for low-moderate use. I am currently using a Sprint Samsung Galaxy S3 on the Bella plan, which is $9.99 + tax (I think it was about $11.xx after tax for me), which includes 400 minutes/400 texts/300mb of data (4G LTE if your phone supports it). I am very impressed with Sprint's coverage in my area. So much so that I may ditch Verizon and just go with Ringplus - I was planning to switch to Page Plus to keep VZW's coverage. If your usage fits this model, this is a tough plan to beat. If I go this route, I may switch to an iPhone 5 so I can use iMessages to text my wife - right now my only issue with the Bella plan is that I am using 500-600 texts per month on my current plan. and that overage would end up costing an extra $2-4, which is not terrible, all told. Also a potential negative for some people is that there is no roaming on Ringplus's plans.

Anyway, so far so good. Just wanted to share! This is a great plan for people with good Sprint coverage who need a reasonable amount of data. Most plans in this price range don't include any data, or some miniscule amount.

[TheGadfly]

Hi Shade,

I'm in exactly the same situation that you were in back in June.  I've been on Verizon for years and I'm finally able to make the switch to a cheaper alternative.  I bought an unlocked Nexus 5 to experiment with a few networks before committing to one.  For now, I'm deciding against Republic Wireless because I don't want to be stuck with an RP phone if I decide the Sprint network isn't cutting it.  I'm also reluctant to join Ting because the usage buckets don't really jive with my usage (same as yours).

Anyway, how are you liking RingPlus?

[Daley]

I'm also reluctant to join Ting because the usage buckets don't really jive with my usage (same as yours).

Have you looked into EcoMobile or Kajeet?

I won't deny that RingPlus has some of the best Sprint MVNO rates available, but it comes at the price of privacy and datamining (which is why it's not in the guide). Of course, that really doesn't seem to bother too many people around here, thus part of the popularity of Republic and FreedomPop. Plus, some of their package availability used to have some regional restrictions which made things confusing for some folk. However, RingPlus is still a better deal than Republic (especially for solo ex-Sprint customers), and especially now that they've branched into providing VoIP minutes with their calling packages. I will hand it to them, they're certainly pushing some needed innovation (far more than Republic could ever claim), even if I don't agree with their legal contracts.

[BSparr]

Ringplus has a major caveat!

They run the calls through their own system AND Sprint's system, which adds latency and degrades the call quality, sometimes beyond usability.

https://discourse.ringplus.net/t/call-quality-discussion-sprint-or-rp-technical/2380/833

I made two 2 min length calls, one via RP+ and one via native Sprint, to one of my test numbers that generate .wav voicemail files. During the 2 min, I played a pre-recorded file with various utterances of my voice that are used to test speech recognition engines, into the phone's microphone. I kept the distance and loudness exactly the same between the runs.

I took the resulting voicemail files and fed them via an web API to Google Speech engine used by developers. This API does not perform search prediction on the recognized result, and it merely perform speech recognition and return back recognized result in text. Since there is no prediction involved and it's a good way to test intelligibility and quality of the input files. I then did a word by word count of the result using standard method for counting errors and the results are:

Original file: 100% of the words were recognized correctly.
Sprint terminated call: 96% of the words were recognized correctly.
RP+ terminated call: 74% of the words were recognized correctly.

They also have frequent outages.

I had to stop using them because my callers kept saying "I think we have a bad connection, I can't understand you."

So many people were complaining that they started censoring their own forums despite pledging not to. https://discourse.ringplus.net/t/call-quality-discussion-sprint-or-rp-technical/2380/120 if you're interested or nodiscourse.imgur.com if it gets taken down.

Very sad - they seemed so promising when they started up.

Update: The whole thing blew up over the past few days. RingPus' CTO took to Reddit to try and defend themselves. http://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/2vbqbv/people_have_been_complaining_on_ringpluss_forums/

It's not going well.