I just got one of the pay as you go phones. We have issues with towers in our area. There isn't enough of them. They just put a tower up in our town(yeah!!!) and it only works for verizon phones. You should talk to one of the people before you chose a phone to see what towers they will work with. Not sure how your area is, but here we only have at&t and verizon. They sell phones that will not even work in our area. There is a code on the box that will tell you what towers it will work with. At&t phones get no signal at all here but I get full bars because mine is works off of verizon.