Mingo Wireless is reportedly switching from being a Verizon MVNO to being a Sprint MVNO.  On their website the activations system is temporarily unavailable while they switch systems.

Who is Mingo Wireless?  They are a prepaid MVNO offering simple rates for Pay-as-you-go and bundled plans.  They are most known for their exceptional customer service.  If you read any of the forums, like Howard Forums, you will find nothing but positive comments regarding Mingo, their plans, and their customer service.

Mingo has two plan categories:

1. MingoFlex – Pay-As-You-Go.
2. MingoPlus – Monthly Bundles that include free nights and weekends

They also offer additional features such as:

• Text Messaging: 10 cents per SMS
• Mobile Web: 59 cents per MB
• Picture Messaging: 20 cents per message

So the question is, why are they leaving Verizon?  They seem to have a great thing going, with loyal customers, simple plans, and a great nationwide network.  The switch is creating an issue for some customers that love Mingo but don’t have good Sprint coverage in their areas.  Mingo is helping these customers move to PagePlus.  That will be a shock for customers that are used to getting their questions answered in under and hour of hold time.  Although, they will still have that great Verizon network, and PagePlus’s well-rounded rate plans.

Mingo is sticking to its great customer service by doing everything it can to help their customers transition as they need.  They are assisting in porting the customers to the carrier of their choice, and refunding any balance left once the port is complete.

Hope fully this transition to the Sprint MVNO program benefits Mingo.  It seems to me that Verizon is loosing in all of this.  Now Mingo will join the ranks of other Sprint MVNO’s like Kajeet, Total Call, PlatinumTel, and many others that have become successful MVNO’s under the Sprint umbrella.

Simple Mobile, a T-Mobile MVNO, announced today a new lineup of unlimited plans. The most interesting aspect of the new plans is the addition of unlimited data. The new plans are:

• $40: Unlimited talk and text
• $50: Unlimited talk and text, with 100 MB of data
• $60: Unlimited talk, text and data

It is unknown if the unlimited data offering has any hard caps similar to those applied by other carriers (in some cases 1, 2, or 5 GB). With these new rates, Simple Mobile now holds a clear advantage over other GSM MVNOs with unlimited plans, such as H2O Wireless and Airvoice Wireless, both of whom offer unlimited talk and text for $40, but lack any data offering.

H2O Wireless has just updated their plans with the most significant change being a drop in price for their Unlimited Talk and Text plan from $50 to $40. Per H2O’s website, the $40 plan has been given the name “Pure”.

Plan details are as follows:

• Monthly cost: $40
• Talk: unlimited
• Text: unlimited
• Data: unavailable

H2O also offers “Day” and “Minute” plans. The “Day” plan features unlimited nights and weekends for $1 per day on the day the phone is used. Peak minutes on the “Day” plan are billed at fourteen (14) cents per minute. The “Minute” plan features two bundles: 500 minutes for $29.99 and 800 minutes for $39.99, six cents and five cents per minute respectively.

For more information, visit H2O’s website.

PlatinumTel Prepaid Wireless announced the introduction of “Real Paygo“, an a al carte prepaid cell phone plan that offers what the company dubbed as “the most competitive rates in prepaid cell phone service”.

Here are the details of the new plan:

• Five (5) cents per minute
• Two (2) cents per text message
• Ten (10) cents per megabyte of web use
• Ten (10) cents per picture message
• Plans are available in $10, $20, $30, $50, and $100 increments. The $10 and $20 plans provide 90 days of service, the $30 and $50 provide 180 days of service, and the $100 provides a full year of service.
• Free long distance
• Free on-network roaming

Pros: This is considered to be the cheapest pay-as-you-go offering in the United States, especially the SMS and Data rates.

Cons: Phone selection isn’t great, at least what’s available online (vs. retail).

For more information, visit the “Real Paygo” plan page.

Also, you can visit PlatinumTel’s “Compare Tool” which compares Real Paygo to the AT&T, Net10, and T-Mobile pay-as-you-go offerings.

Nothing concrete, but soon we will find out if (finally) a GSM provider will enter the Unlimited prepaid price wars. I’m talking about Airvoice Wireless. Rumor on the Internets has it that the company is coming out with an Unlimited plan on GSM. Airvoice is an MVNO of Verizon and AT&T. This could present itself as a game changer since all unlimited offerings have come from the CDMA side of things: Page Plus, Virgin Mobile, PlatinumTel, and Boost from the Sprint side (Boost is iDen of course, but they’re a Sprint brand), and Page Plus and Tracfone’s StraightTalk from the Verizon side.

A Twitter user by the name “Airvoice GSM” has been posting updated referencing some Unlimited GSM offering coming from Airvoice (http://twitter.com/AirvoiceGSM). Said user has yet to be confirmed as an official representative of Airvoice.

I’m loving watching this war of the carriers being waged by proxy. The consumer, of course, stands to realize huge savings.