So you have a Family Plan for your cell phone and you get your teenager a cell phone. You disable web access so they do not run up data charges with surfing the web or downloading  games.  You lay down the law about how many minutes they can use a month. You explain how unlimited nights and weekends work (nights start after 7 or 9 PM depending on what plan you have) and you show them how to check how many minutes there are remaining on the plan. You even sign up for unlimited texting, because they are happy to text instead of talk.

The Deal with Texting 

Unlimited texting on the Sprint Family Plan is $20 for all phones on the plan, but without it text messages are 15 cents each, sent and received. For example, send a message and receive a reply and that cost you 30 cents. It does not take long for your teen to burn through $100 or more simply texting. I learned the hard way. They claim ignorance and you would like to too, because you did imagine how they could text so much, but you are stuck with the bill. By the way, texting cannot be disabled on Sprint/Nextel phones. You can restrict who they can call and who can call them. You can disable web access and downloads and roaming, but I guess the "freedom to text message" has been added to the Bill of Rights as long as you can pay the bill. You can ground, bribe and plead but your teen is likely to give in to the pressure. Plus you cannot stop other teens from texting your teen. You can tell them, but then they will forget or ignore you and text any way. You are not their parent. Therefore, go with the unlimited plan or have a pay-as-you-go plan that they are responsible paying for. Unfortunately, with pay-as-you-go plans you may not know who is calling your teen or who they are calling, but that is another story. Also, the phones and the minutes will cost more.

After all that you think you have your bases covered then you get your bill and you see multiple $9.99 per month subscriptions for ring tones and $1.99 per message charges (that will be covered in another article). What the (insert explicative here)!!! You call the phone company and complain and they answer that these are legitimate charges, but will disable web access on the phone. Thanks a lot, but I already did that. Once again your teens claim ignorance and then after further interrogation they think they might of tried to order some ring tones from an ad in the back of Seventeen or Cosmogirl magazine.

Accidental Ringtone Subscriptions  

Look back in the magazine and sure enough you will find full page ads for ringtones, wallpapers, hot hunk movie animations and future husband tests. In large text at the top of the page you are instructed to send a text message containing "teen+code" to a five digit number. It is so easy! In small print at the botom of the page you learn that you can download five ringtones per month for a subscription rate of only $9.99 a month. I could get HBO for that much. I could buy 10 complete songs from iTunes instead of 30 second snippets of a song done by cover artists. Now if you have web access disabled on your phone you cannot download the fake ringtones, but your phone bill will still be charged every month. On the bill there is no explanation or instructions on how-to cancel your subscription. You have to track down the web site and discover what number to send "STOP" to, to stop the insanity and stop the drain on your bank account. 

Make Your Own Ringtone? Maybe

Instead of subscribing, you could, buy your ringtones one at a time from your cell phone carrier. I have Sprint and the cost is $2.50 per ringtone. The music snippets are from the actual artists, but it is $1.50 more than the whole song I would purchase from iTunes. Then the thought occurs to you that you can transfer data to your phone via a cable you usually have to buy separately or via Bluetooth for free if your computer has Bluetooth. Well, I have Bluetooth on my Mac and with Leopard, it is even easier to transfer files to and from your phone. Many phones will play MP3's and you can use a free program like Audacity (an open source audio editor that will work on Linux, Windows and Macs) to trim a song down to a suitable length for a ringer. However, once you convert, edit and transfer the song over you might discover that you cannot assign the song as a ringtone. You can play it, but you cannot use it as a ringer, at least not on a locked cell phone from Sprint. I have read that this is possible on a iPhone, even though Apple sells ringtone versions  of many of the songs available online for 99 cents and you can select which part of the song to use as a ringtone right from within iTunes.

There is a work-around that my daughter's boyfriend revealed to me. If your phone has a voice recorder, you could record the song via the cell phone's mic and then assign it as a ringer. This does not give you the same control or quality you would have with the above method using Audacity, but it does allow to have a variety of ringtones for free and remember we are only talking about ringtones. I remember when you had no control over your phone's ringer which by the way you did not own and had to lease from the phone company monopoly. You could not even adjust the volume, but that shows you how old I am and how far we have come. It use to be a big deal for a household to have a separate phone line for the teens. That family was rich. Now it is not uncommon for every family member to have their own phone that they can play "Are you smarter than a 5th Grader" on, customize with hot hunks wallpapers and fake ringtones.