How to input your Tracfone pin numbers correctly.

Tracfone has some major benefits: it's cheap, especially if you're smart and you buy a airtime card that includes the Double Minutes for Life feature. This will bring down your cost per minute to about $0.10 a minute, which is competitive with the other prepaid carrier's prices.

Another benefit, it does not have any daily access charges. While you do have to keep your service days current, this is different from having to pay a $1 per day upfront for each day you use your phone, like T-Mobile's plan does for example. Also,when you purchase a Tracfone airtime card it comes with service days right along with calling minutes, so it's not a big deal. That is why I didn't like my Virgin Mobile prepaid phone as well - if I needed to make only a single call that lasted on 3 minutes, it cost me a $1 access charge, and as I usually did not make long calls on that phone, it was aggravating to pay the upfront charge.

However, Tracfone has some drawbacks. One of these drawbacks is the problem that some customers have with their tracfone sim card. As you're probably aware, Tracfone operates a mobile virtual network, basically buying access to 30 carrier's cell towers and then reselling this access to you and me. The great thing about this is, instead of just having the Sprint network at your disposal, for example, now you have Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, Nextel and so forth access. Also, as long as you purchase a phone model from www.tracfone.com that specifically says it has the same flat rate for all local, long distance and roaming calls, you will never pay roaming charges.

The upshot of all this is, you have access to basically every cell phone tower in the U.S., without having to have 10 different carriers - your Tracfone automatically has access to them all.

However, this quilt work network that incorporates many different carriers into it, can create confusion and problems. More than likely, you will want a local number for your cell phone, and if you get a phone with the wrong SIM card in it, you may not be able to access the appropriate network to get either coverage or the number you need.

For example, your local tower is T-Mobile, which is the T5 sim card, but you have the C4 Cingular sim card in your phone, so it will want to make your home number based on the nearest T-mobile tower, which may be 30 miles away.

While your T5 card will be able to access any tower, no matter the carrier, it will not be able to grant you a Cingular phone number, you must switch sim cards to do so.