Beyond Wireless GSM

Beyond Wireless GSM is another smaller prepaid cellphone service that offers an interesting mix of features. Here’s a quick rundown.

Phones

On their website, you can choose from a few refurbished (or as they call it: “like new”) Nokia and Motorola phones. They also offer Siemens and LG phones, but when I checked they did not have any of those “like new” phones in stock. The phones are the simple and reliable kind. For example, there are no camera phones.

In retail stores, however, you have a much wider selection: everything from the standby cheap Motorola C139 to the Motorola RAZR V3. You can guess at their entire selection by looking at their list of downloadable manuals for all their phones.

Plans and Rates

Online purchases

For online purchases, Beyond Wireless’s basic rate is 15 cents per minute plus different bonuses for buying different denominations of airtime cards. So when you buying the higher priced airtime cards, you get more “free” minutes as calculated against their basic rate.

Their cheapest amount of airtime you can buy is with their $5 airtime card which gives you 40 minutes. Beyond says that you get $1 “free” for buying the $5 card for a total value of $6. So they’re saying that $5 card is actually worth $6. If you take $6 divided by 40 minutes gives you a rate of 15 cents per minute.

If you buy their most expensive standard airtime card for $100, you get 1110 minutes, giving you an effective rate of about 9 cents per minute. Beyond says that’s like getting $66.50 free, because 1110 minutes at the rate of 15 cents per minute would cost $166.50.

Retail purchases

For retail purchases, you get smaller amounts of “free” airtime bonuses. So the $5 card only gets you 33 minutes ($0 bonus), and the $100 card gets you 926 minutes ($39 bonus instead of $66.50).

So, if it’s possible, you should definitely buy airtime online.

Beyond Wireless GSM airtime cards expire after either 15, 30, 45, 60 or 90 days depending on the airtime card. However you can also buy a one-year airtime card.

One-year plan

You can buy a one-year airtime card online for $50 which gives you 113 minutes and extends you service period to one-year. A $15 card purchased online gives you 126 minutes so you’re paying roughly $30 to $35 dollars to extend your service period to one-year. This compares pretty well to Tracfone, for example, which charges you $49 and no minutes to extend your service for one year.(Though Tracfone also have other deals such as one year cards with minutes or one-year cards with double minutes for life, etc.)

Text Messages

It costs you 10 cents to either send or receive a text message. This is somewhere between average and a little high. If you’re going to do a lot of texting, you should probably try Virgin Mobile, especially as they offer phones with qwerty-style keyboards. Still for a quick msg to meet a friend, etc., this is good enough.

International Calling

The Beyond Wireless website touts “30 days of unlimited international calling available. Access to over 70 countries and 400+ locations”. However, nowhere else on their website is there any further explanation. I suspect that like Tracfone, they have arranged to provide calling to certain international locations at no additional charge. That is, you are charged the regular airtime for these calls. After 30 days, I suspect there is some kind of surcharge.

Conclusion

Their phones are a little pricey on the low end, but their rates are not too bad. If you do choose them, remember to buy your airtime online!

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