As it has been debated in the past, you only use rollover minutes after you run out of the minutes in the current billing cycle. Once you run out of that month's minutes, you start using the oldest minutes in your rollover pool first followed by the next less old rollover minutes. If the oldest minutes in your rollover pool become 12 months old, they will expire and you will lose them. However, the rest of the minutes in your pool (less than 12 months old) will remain until those become 12 months old unless you use them before that. So for instance, if you have 1400 minutes accumulated, and your oldest minutes expire, you will see a drop in the number of minutes in your rollover pool. This drop is as big as the number of minutes that became 12 months old. Let's say that your oldest minutes are 140 which you rolled over 12 months ago. Your new rollover bucket will now be: 1400 - 140 = 1260 minutes. Now, if during that billing cycle you rolled over, say, 75 minutes, then you have to add those new minutes to the pool. So your new total rollover minutes bucket will be: 1400 - 140 + 75 = 1335 minutes. So you see, even if your oldest minutes expire, your minutes pool is still earning minutes every month unless you use all your minutes for that month. In this case, lets say you went 60 minutes over your normal rate plan that month. Your new total rollover minutes pool will be: 1400 - 140 - 60 = 1200 minutes. That's 1400 you originally had, minus 140 that expired minus 60 that you used in excess over your rate plan minutes that month. Therefore, in a month like that, you won't earn any Rollover minutes because you used them all up.
bobolito, Great job of explaining this feature! While I'm not a Cingular customer, my folks are. They've asked me to explaine to them how their rollover minutes work, however, not being all that close or involved with the service has limited my motivation to try to really understand the feature. Well now I know and can articulate it clearly. Thanks!
Bobo.....do you think they will keep rollover after the merger goes through? I am holding out on upgrading until after the merger to get a "better deal" so to speak with phones/plans offerings.
I believe so...Rollover is what differentiates Cingular from other carriers and it is their excuse for not giving you more minutes.
Just wanted to make a comment about these "rollover minutes".. I believe this is a robbery in the way they account for these minutes! We had over 4800 rollover minutes at one time.. and we noticed that NONE of our previous minutes from more than one month ago were being used EVEN when we had need of rollover minutes in a given month.. It is very convenient for Cingular that they will expire ALL of your minutes from 12 months ago.. even if you need to use rollover minutes.. WHY don't they apply your rollover minutes from 12 months ago to the ones you use in THIS MONTH, BEFORE they expire them.. this is a SHAM.. if you think about it.. THE ONLY WAY FOR YOU TO USE THE MINUTES FROM 12 MONTHS AGO BEFORE THEY EXPIRE IS TO USE ALL THE MINUTES IN BETWEEN NOW and 12 MONTHS AGO, or else you will always lose those minutes.. effectively, you end up expiring ALL of your minutes UNLESS you use them all up in one month.. that is disgusting, and shameful... it pretty much makes these minutes USELESS! Cingular counts on people being stupid and not able to do their math in order to promote this lying offer.
Look on your online account management. If you view your current usage it will show you how much rollover you have, how many rollover are due to expire on the next billing cycle, and the date they will expire. What type of plan are you on that you have 4,800 rollover minutes expiring in one month? If you look at the attached screenshot of my online account management, it clearly shows that I have 193 rollover minutes expiring on 11/03/2006, but I will still have 755 + whatever I rollover this month. Are you sure you had that much rollover, and it all expired in one month? -Jay
Another question, did you lower your monthly plan recently? If so then your rollover minutes will lower to what your new plan's anytime minutes have, but you don't loose all of your rollover minutes for the entire past year. I actually like the idea of the rollover minutes & it seems a lot more fair then loosing the minutes each month that you don't use.
I forgot about that, but still even if the OP switched rateplans recently, what is the chance that they would loose ALL of their rollover between plan changes & expiration. They should have had something left over... BTW- I recently switched rateplans, from Nation 450 to Family Talk 550 and did not loose any rollover. -Jay
From what I understand, if you go Down on your rate minute plan, they remove any rollover minutes except what your new plans minutes are. So if you had a 550 Anytime min plan with 1000 Rollover minutes & lowered your plan to 450, your rollover minutes would now be 450. If you go up on your plan you will not loose any of the rollover minutes built up in your account.
You are supposedto be adjusted whether you go up or down in plans but since these are done manually someone might of just said this guy only has 800 so why waste the time . When we switched from 2100 to 1400 we had 1800 something and they never adjusted it to 1400.
actually you do.... lets say you are on 39.99 (450 peak) you have 1200 minutes in your rollover account... you decide to change to 59.99 (900 peak) your maximum rollover carrover is the number of minutes in the new plan... in this case the rollover balance after the change will be 900 min...a reduction of 300 minutes... heres a quote fron the faq at cingular.com QUESTION: Do I lose my Rollover Minutes? How are rollover minutes expired or forfeited? ANSWER: Minutes will expire from your Current Rollover Balance when the minutes reach an age of 12 billing periods. This normally means that if you have minutes that have sat in your Current Rollover Balance for about a year, they will expire. This does not mean you will lose your entire Current Rollover Balance, but just those minutes that have remained for 12 billing periods. Minutes that are not 12 billing periods old will stay in the Current Rollover Balance until they are used, or they expire when they reach an age of 12 billing periods. The following conditions would cause you to forfeit your Rollover minutes: Changing from a Rollover plan to a Non-Rollover plan. Changing from a Rollover plan to a Military Plan. Changing from a FamilyTalk Rollover to an Individual Rollover plan unless they are the last member to leave the account. Changing to a new Rollover plan where the existing Rollover balance(s) exceeds the Anytime minutes of the new plan. Only minutes in excess of the Anytime minutes in the new plan are forfeited. This will take effect at the end of the billing cycle. Moving to/from Reseller to Cingular service.
Any way to make a few extra cents off someone. Cingular isn't the only one guilty of it though, it's like sprint increasing the per text message rate, Verizon locking OBEX, and well the list goes on.
I think that this person being on crack is a distinct possibility. Bobo's explanation is straight forward. The only way Cingular could really be screwing you is if you used the newest rollover mins first...and at one point I think that is how they used to work. But customers probably threatened to burn the place down and now it works as Bobo described.
I had to do an account move, from Atlanta to Charlotte...which basically was a cancel and restart because the two markets being different. I did not loose our rollover mins. We might have, but I specifically asked like four times and made sure we didn't. I am kind of a pain in the a$$ sometimes.
i know this is old, but i can't help myself but to correct the math. i'm hoping i'm wrong tho, but the last example you gave, wouldn't the overage of 60 minutes be covered by the 140? so now, the oldest rollover month is 80 minutes left and then expires. 1400 - 80 = 1320 minutes
I believe that the rollover used during a month is applied to the entire rollover balance before old rollover minutes are forfeited. Otherwise there would be no reason to warn the subscriber of a pending loss of rollover minutes. You are given a heads up to use them before you lose them. Under the Commutative Law of Addition, it does not matter about the order in which you add the numbers. The 140 minutes are already included in the 1400 minutes total. Since you use the oldest minutes first, some of the older minutes about to be forfeited would have been used before they could be forfeited. That means that the balance would be reduced by 80 minutes rather than 140 minutes. The same thing would apply if one had minutes to add because all were not used up
It would depend on whether the minutes are "expired" or "expiring". If they've expired, bobolito's correct. If they're expiring, then you are correct. Haven't had AT&T in a while and can't remember what it says on the bill, plus I never had it long enough for my minutes to expire.
This is what it says: The expired minutes would have been forfeited already. There is never a reference to them. You use rollover minutes immediately so your rollover balance declines as the rollover minutes are used. At the end of the billing cycle you would have fewer minutes which have been there for a full twelve billing cycles if you had to use some of them during the current billing cycle.
Page 2 of the statement, tells you how many rollover minutes will expire next billing cycle. In order to understand how billing and features work for your wireless account, u must first learn how to read your statement.
You were not going to loose them to begin with. All there had to be done was a simple relocation. Moving ur account from one market to another, to provide you a number for your area. Yes you get a new account number. So no, there was no "might have" in the whole equation.
Why would you reply to a nearly four year old message? This is from the profile of the member to whom you replied:
