Then I went into a t-mobile store and bought a few $25/mo SIM cards, put credit card on file to auto renew each month, slapped them in, and pointed our NMS’s at them.
Since this comes up from time to time, here's the cheapest US SIM plans I know of. Tracfone BYOD runs on AT&T or Verizon (the latter is LTE only) and the cheapest plan is $18 for 90 days if you sign up and autorenew. That gives you 180 SMS. and if you want them 180 mins of voice and 180MB of data, unused rolls over. Customer service is OK, seems to be in the US, aimed at a bilingual Spanish/English market. Airvoice Wireless runs on AT&T. Their $10/mo plan is good for 500 SMS/mo, no rollover. Their $20/mo plan has unmetered SMS and voice. They have very good US-based customer service. R's, John