Mandalay Parr wrote:
I had ATT for 25 years and never ripped off.
I have Verizon now.
Verizon and ATT are the best. It just depends on the area. I think all the rest use their towers.
I am a heavy data user (80-106 gb / mo.) so I have the unlimited plan.
I use my iPhone as a hot spot.
Sprint and T-Mobile have their own towers. The trick for any service when looking at their coverage is to look at their non-roaming services where they always operate on their own towers. Roaming means they're using other vendors towers. and roaming depends on your plan.
The other thing to look at is post-paid vs. pre-paid. Almost all the services will do roaming on post-paid accounts which are typically a bit more expense. Almost none of them will roam on their pre-paid plans, so if you go for the lowest price possible you need to look at the non-roaming coverage.
AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM technology while Verizon and Sprint use CDMA. GSM and CDMA are not compatible so roaming between them doesn't work. However, it appears all LTE technology is the same so with it roaming between all the services is much more likely.
In addition, there are multiple bands and frequencies that the various services use. Generally speaking a service running on a lower frequency will have better coverage and call quality in buildings and congested areas. I believe Verizon has the lion's share of the lower frequency bands (700-750Mhz) at this time, although T-Mobile is making a big push to roll out technology on their newly acquired 600Mhz bands. Unfortunately at this time there aren't any or very many phones that can operate on those bands.
Also, if your primary use is data and you're looking for cheap plans with unlimited, most of the services are providing "car-connect" type options like Mobley (AT&T) and SynchOn?? (T-Mobile). Verizon has something similar I believe. Most run about $20/mo for unlimited data and are designed to plug into the OBD-II port on your vehicle. There are dongles you can find on eBay that allow these devices to be powered on USB or 110v instead of a vehicle OBD-II port and they work quite well.
