Centennial Wireless was a regional cell phone company with a couple of million subscribers. AT&T acquired them in order to get their customers. As part of the plan, they had to sell off Centennial service and subscribers in Louisiana and Mississippi. The areas include Lafayette, Beauregard, Iberville and West Feliciana in Louisiana and Claiborne, MS.
Updated: 2/4/2013
Now, when you go to their website, you are redirected to a page describing the AT&T merger. Thus, the information that follows is provided only for reference.
While Centennial offered standard contracts, it did have a prepaid plan called MyPhone. You can see my review below of what they used to offer starting with their coverage.
Centennial Wireless provides coverage in the Midwest in parts of Michigan, Indiana and Ohio and in the southeast in parts of Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.
If you are roughly in that darkened area you may be covered, which would give you the option of trying their prepaid plan.
The MyPhone plan has a basic rate for airtime voice minutes and charges various amounts for various kinds of messaging and other extras.
Under the MyPhone plan, airtime costs 20 cents per minute when in their coverage area and 40 cents per minutes. This is somewhat high especially if you roam.
Text messages cost 10 cents to send and receive while MMS messages cost 25 cents.
There is a daily fee of 10 cents for CallerID. Presumably you incur this cost on the days you receive a call which would trigger the service.
Voicemail also costs 10 cents per day.
Both CallerID and voicemail are optional services and you can choose to turn them off.
Directory Assistance costs 99 cents plus airtime. You can try Google's free service (1-800-GOOG-411) but you'll lost airtime while listening to their ads, but probably not 99 cents worth.
Call-waiting is the one thing that's free. After all, it helps them for you to answer call-waiting.
You can buy airtime cards for $20, $40, $60 or $80, and the airtime on those cards is good for 30, 60, 90 or 120 day. So you basically have to spend $20 a month.
So you've looked these rates over and decided, well you'll give them a try, so let's take a look at their selections of phones. Hey, wait a minute, there's only one . . .
Back in 2008, the only Centennial Wireless cell phone you could purchase was the the Motorola C139. The phone costs $59.99 back then. As a comparison, Tracfone and GoPhone have usually charged between $10 and $20 for this basic phone.
You can buy the phone online when they're in stock or else go to a Centennial Wireless store.
Still, it's a reliable, though very basic, phone. Plus the fact that they offer only one phone should make it easier in terms of getting technical support if you ever need to call them up.
One handy feature is a small flashlight that might come in handy
when looking for the keyhole when coming home in the winter or when
reading a map in the car.
Centennial Wireless is a relatively expensive prepaid cell phone provider with a higher than average airtime rate. The minimum required monthly expense is also slightly higher than average.
However, they may be a good deal in their coverage area. Because they are a regional provider, it might be a good idea to go to a Centennial Wireless retail location to check them out further.