Smartphone Plans

How much do you pay a month for your cell phone service plan that includes a smartphone? Even though that phone is wonderful when it comes to using the different VoIP systems, you are still probably shelling out a good bit on the bill. But good news: Facing stiff competition from budget carriers, all of the major networks recently began offering cheaper “prepaid” plans – which could save you a ton of money. Instead of entering a two-year contract, a “prepaid plan” enables you to pay monthly, without a commitment to stay with a particular service provider. These no-contract, prepaid phone plans used to be just for dumb-phones, the ones that did not really do anything. So here are the amazing deals:

• If you’re a heavy talk and data user, the best plan is on Sprint’s network through Boost Mobile: $50/month for 2.5 GB of data. (Compare this to Verizon and AT&T’s plans – $60/month for 2 GB.) Better yet, if you make six, monthly, on-time payments in a row, Boost will knock $5 off your monthly bill every month thereafter. They’ll reduce your bill again at 12 months, and again at 18 months, so that after a year and a half you could be paying as little as $35/month – if you haven’t switched plans by then.

• If you don’t talk much but use a lot of web access (say, you’re a teenager), Virgin Mobile has a $35/month for 300 minutes of talk – and unlimited text and data.

• If you use a moderate amount of data but want unlimited talk and text, T-Mobile offers unlimited talk and text, plus 500 MB of data for $50/month.

• The cheapest deal I’ve recently seen form the big carriers: If you dig down deep on T-Mobile’s prepaid plan page, you’ll find a plan with only 100 minutes of talk, but unlimited text and data for – get this – $30 a month.

Virtual Therapists

So as we move further and further into the digital age, it seems as though more and more computers are being placed in the position where there used to be humans. Of course companies want to make things more effective and efficient but I wonder if anyone has ever stopped to think if this is such a great idea for some of the positions that might need a certain human touch? Communication services is one of the biggest sections where computers are dominating, from call forwarding to call centers that have you go though about twenty different menus all the while pushing buttons. Some are voice automated but it does seem to help. To add insult to injury, computers that act as speech therapists are being tested. People without speech issues end up wanting to jump across to the other end of the line and destroy that device that will not let them talk to a really human. So what about those people that need constant speech therapy? While the verbal impairment can be life-long, health insurers only pay for a limited amount of therapy. Yet patients like Green need to continuously practice their skills. Does anyone else see the glaring problem with the system?

Cost of VoIP

There’s no doubt that VoIP offers a myriad of benefits, including decreased expenses and increased productivity, but at what cost? According to Columbia researchers, it is a very high one and it is not monetary. The security is one of the biggest downsides of internet phone services. At a recent Amphion Forum, a conference on the security of connected devices, Ang Cui, a fifth-year grad student from the Columbia University Intrusion Detection Systems Lab and his colleague, Computer Science Professor Salvatore Stolfo, demonstrated how easily an IP phone could be compromised. Using a popular Cisco VoIP phone, Cui quickly attached a small external device which allows the transfer of binary malicious code to the phone. The attack enables remote and undetected access to the phone’s microphone, which allows the hacker to activate the microphone without it being noticed and to eavesdrop on conversations in the surrounding environment, even when there is no phone call in progress. The compromised phone can also be used to attack other devices on the network, such as computers, phones and printers. This is the wake up call that demands attention and improvements in security.