The average U.S. wireless subscriber is now paying $90 a month for service – and $111 for those who own iPhones, according to data compiled by financial experts The Cowen Group.
What if you could cut that to $0, with the only catch being you have to be covered by a WiFi signal to get coverage?
That’s the remarkable proposition now on offer from Scratch Wireless, an Acton, Massachusetts, startup. It’s been offering limited-edition WiFi-only service with a $269 device for over a year, and last week rolled out a $99 Android device made by CoolPad that comes with unlimited WiFi service.
“You can use all of the facility of the smartphone, over WiFi, anywhere in the world, completely free,’’ said Jon Finegold, the company’s vice president of marketing. It also comes with unlimited free texting over the Sprint network.
What’s behind all this is WiFi becoming more and more available everywhere, through access points at businesses and in your home, and through a nationwide network of hundreds of thousands of hotspots operated by Comcast’s Xfinity (Comcast is NECN’s parent company) and four other cable companies.
If you get out of range of WiFi or the connection's weak, you can instantly buy a day's worth of backup Sprint cellular network calling for $2, or 100 minutes a month for $7. Scratch also offers backup buckets of cellular data too. You can always make and never pay for 911 emergency calls when you’re within range of a cell site, and it’s possible to switch your existing phone number over to a new Scratch phone.
Leaders of MITX, the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, a trade group, just voted Scratch the best tech concept of the year.
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As a phone for teens who spend most of their time in a WiFi-enabled home or school and spend most of their phone time texting anyway, or for someone whose daily routine has them using a phone solely or mainly when they’re covered by WiFi at home or work, it’s easy to see the value and appeal. Of course, it can be hard to predict just how often you'll want to use a phone when you're not near home or work or public WiFi.
Scratch does offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, and while the company doesn’t break out how many users it has, Finegold says they’ve found about two-thirds of their smartphone owners “in a given month live completely free of any bill’’ and the remaining third buy some kind of pass for data or voice service.
