Who is your cell phone provider?

Villager...
How old is that Consumer Reports survey? I notice it doesn't list AT&T but has Cingular.

I have T-Mobile and I'm dropping it at the end of May when my contract expires. I'm going to either Verizon or AT&T, but I haven't decided yet.

Any other T-Mobile customers get bills at wildly varying intervals? I once pulled out a years' worth of bills and wrote down the start/end dates on each and found their "months" varied in length from as little as 21 days to a max of 45 days. Their customer service dept had no explanation for it other than to say that it was the way it was.

--- John B.

 

Wow! Sorry about that. I didn't notice it was from 2006. Here's the 2008. I guess if you combine the ratings you can see an overview of quality over the years? Verizon was rated number 1 or number 2 in all 20 of the metropolitan areas they reviewed.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Verizon70. 70
T-Mobile8. 68
AT&T 61. 61
Sprint 5. 59

 

It better! "The new Sprint World Headquarters Campus occupies 240 acres in the...suburb of Overland Park."

http://www.sprint.com/hr/worldheadquarters.html

 

And DCDavis a beautiful campus it is, we need more of that here.

 

The attached PDF has the Consumer Reports Guide to Carriers, which go into further detail about the ratings.

 

I have T-Mobile and get coverage from here to DC with no problem areas. My bills are the same every month! I have internet, texting....full wi-fi services, and I use every service regularly (not while I am driving, of course.) I have been with them for four years, and pleased as can be! I love the T-Mobile "hotspots" available at Starbucks.

 

For you all that have AT&T - if your phone's SIM card is more than a year old - go to the AT&T store for a FREE SIM upgrade. It gets better coverage witht he new card.

 

While I know they are actively replacing the older and less capable SIM cards, I am not sure how a SIM card is going to improve coverage. I think this is just a line that the sales reps are telling folks in order to get SIMs replaced for other reasons that probably benefit AT&T or perhaps fix an issue or limitation they don't want known. Telling you it will improve coverage will simply make the customer both feel good and also most likely prevent any questions as to why replace. Not that it's necessarily a bad move, I just don't buy that the SIM card plays any factor in coverage.

 

Got them replaced in three phones. All have a clearer signal.


Just sayin'.

 

Same here for all of our AT&T phones. There has to be tech expert here who can tell us if the better reception is real or imagined.

 

Perhaps they are rolling out a new network that the old SIM cards won't attach to. That could possibly explain it.

 

Thanks for this. Makes sense to me!

 

Would this be applicable to a blackberry too?

 

I used to have T-mobile when I first moved here 5 years ago. contract expired after 1 year, I was sick of their bs excuses for everything. I went to sprint and have been them for 4 years now and love them.

 

From what I have heard, the new SIM cards allow greater access to the cell network in order to give you a little more "coverage". I was told that it pretty much just lets AT&T open up the bandwidth in the cell nodes and repeaters, allowing more people on with better features.

All this came from an Army micro-commo guy that takes cell phones apart for a hobby.