But you don’t need to be a dinner entrée for your carrier, as evidenced by the significant minority of customers in our poll who qualify as cellular sharks. Those big fish beat the tuna at their own game—or, should we say, the sharks know how to turn contract carriers into sushi?

Where minnows leave about half of their daytime/anytime minutes on the table, sharks have a feeding frenzy with freebie minutes; the anytime/daytime minutes are merely an appetizer that’s rarely overeaten. Our sharks are such efficient minute-eating machines, they made calls that totaled two to three times the number of daytime/anytime minutes they purchased with their plans, by taking advantage of all the free minutes in their plans.

Different species of shark favored different freebies. Sharks with only one phone line made their biggest killing with free night & weekend minutes, as did sharks with three lines.

By contrast, two- and four-line sharks preferred to gorge on free mobile-to-mobile minutes, with that type comprising around half of the total minutes used. My theory: Calls in these two-line families are disproportionately between spouses—do we have a Valentine’s Day story here?—and to kids on the same multi-phone account.

Although results from this informal poll lack the scientific validity of surveys by the Consumer Reports National Research Center—the in-house polling experts who produce our annual survey of cell phone satisfaction—my findings do provide a useful snapshot that advances our understanding and ongoing coverage of cellular pricing and usage.

That’s especially so since data on the prevalence of cellular sharks and minnows has been elusive. The “average customer” data provided by the industry instead creates a mythical, middle-of-the-road cellular consumer who is neither predator nor prey. When I asked cell service carriers for data, they wouldn’t tell, citing it as proprietary information.

—Jeff Blyskal