Cellphone Plan Purchase Guideline for Oversea Students in U.S. (Updated by July 2014)

U.S. telecom market:

• 1. There are 4 major carriers in U.S. market. They are AT&T，T-mobile，Verizon and Sprint. ATT and T-mobile use GSM technology. Students from many countries in Asia and Europe (Including China, India, Korea, except Japan and others) can bring your cellphone to U.S. and make phone calls.
• 2. There are mainly two type of phone plans, postpaid and prepaid. Most people with a reasonable amount of phone calls will choose postpaid. Basically if you use more than 200 minutes, choose postpaid. If less than 200 minutes, most likely you need prepaid to cut your phone bill.
• 3. In postpaid plan category, there are individual plan and family plan.

Most valuable plan and most economic plan:

• 4. The most valuable plan is to buy your individual plan through uMeMobile at a family plan price.
• 5. The most economic plan is to build a “family” plan with your friends. You can have up to 10 persons in an ATT family plan or 7 persons in T-mobile family plan. (Number may change by time).
• 6. When you build a family plan, please choose one of your “family” member as your account owner, make sure each member has a commitment to be in the plan for a certain period of time, each person share the responsibility to split the monthly bill, use a reasonable amount of your shared data, and pay the account owner in time.
• 7. Please note 4 major carrier requires U.S. Social Security Number (which is U.S. national ID) and will check your credit history. The reason is to verify whether you have a good credit (which means you will pay the bill in time). If the account owner does not have a SSN or good credit history, carrier usually require $500 deposit per line.
• 8. Please note for the plans from 4 carriers, your total cost will be plan price plus tax. Tax rate is state and city specific, usually in a range of 12%-22%.

About cell phone compatibility and signal strength:

• 9. Check your phone specs to verify if you can have 4G or 3G in U.S. ATT 3G is running on WCDMA 1900/2100 frequency, T-mobile 3G is running on WCDMA 1700/2100 frequency. Specs can also be written as UMTS 1700/2100, UMTS 1900/2100. Phones may have international version and U.S. version and the specs may be different.
• 10. To find the signal strength in your location, you can refer to ATT and T-mobile official website. ATT signal map is available here: http://www.att.com/maps/wireless-coverage.html#fbid=H9kR5k9FRix T-mobile signal map is available here: http://www.t-mobile.com/coverage.html

Feel free email support@uMeMobile.com if you have any questions.