Best Cell Phone Service

Airdaile wrote:
We had Sprint and went to Verizon Wireless. The straw that broke the camel's back was a week in OBX with a cell tower in line of sight from our campsite and no signal on the Sprint phones.

Most cell phone companies do not own their own towers, they lease space on towers from communication companies that make their profit erecting and maintaining those towers. Often, a cell carrier will have a lease dispute over the price of tower space or the market (subscriber base) in that area is too small for a company to recover the cost of installing their equipment on a given tower.

I worked for Sprint for 16 years and dealt with spotty coverage because they provided me with free service and a discount on a phone. When I left the company, I went with Straight Talk. I find it amusing that I pay $45/month for service that includes 25 GB of data when my wife's company pays the same amount per phone but has to share 25 GB of data between 4 users thru AT&T.

VERIZON

I like Verizon.

I've only had Verizon but have had very good reception most everywhere.

I suppose it somewhat depends on where you live and travel. For us in Oregon traveling in OR, CA, WA,ID, MT, AZ, utah etc. Verizon has better coverage than ATT. our truck has ATT, as do many friends. Our cell phones are Verizon. We find more places where ATT doesn't have service while verizon does than the other way around. Having both is nice for the occasional condition when Verizon has no service but ATT does. What is disapointing is that there are major streches of interstate highway we have traveled on where Verizon has service but ATT has no service for stretches of 50 miles or more.

We have quite a few remote campsites where cell service w/o a booster is non existent. With a booster again Verizon wins over ATT. Friends with ATT quite often don't get reception with our booster but we get a strong signal with Verizon.

Our daughter has sprint and it comes in a distant third. Even at our house sprint reception is very weak.

jjrbus wrote:
When you break down in Hell's canyon SD and there is no cell phone service for any carrier. It does not matter who made your smart phone or who your carrier is! My vote is for the cheapest service.

In that narrow context, yes, you would be correct. For the rest of the time, you want it to work. I know I do.

If you have Comcast check out Xfinity mobile. My wife and I switched to that last fall and to date the highest monthly bill for both phones was a few cents over $16. They use the Verizon network

When you break down in Hell's canyon SD and there is no cell phone service for any carrier. It does not matter who made your smart phone or who your carrier is! My vote is for the cheapest service.

Not to get off topic too far but does the cell phone play a role in reception? Type of phone, built in antenna, etc.?

Verizon has the best coverage. While we still had parents living, we had Verizon so we would never be out of touch. Now that WE are the parents living, it is not our problem anymore. We now have a lower cost cell service. However, there are a lot of places we have no cell service.