[geeks] Opinions on T-Mobile and Verizon

[Chad McAuley]

Rick Hamell wrote:
> I use a cheap Samsung phone on T-Mobile with the pre-paid plan. They had a
> special about two years ago, that if you bought $100 worth of Pre-paid, you
> had a year to use it. Since it takes me about 6 months to use the 1000
> minutes I get at $100, it's worth it to me.
I think that's a standard part of their pre-paid service now.  Buying 
$100 worth of minutes gets you gold status, which gives you a 10% bonus 
on future airtime purchases, and airtime doesn't expire for a year.

>
> But their coverage sucks. I drive up the I-5 corridor to Seattle fairly
> often and loose reception outside any of the cities. Granted there isn't
> anything in between Seattle and Portland worth noting anyways so it's not
> that big of a loss.
My coverage hasn't been bad here in Kansas City, although the majority 
of my calls are made from a handful of regular locations. It's certainly 
better than when I was with Sprint, since the two places I use the phone 
most (home and work) I was lucky if I had a strong enough signal for the 
phone to actually ring. 

I just checked the coverage map, which shows my house as being in a 4 
bar area.  Depending on where I am in the house I get 3-6 bars (6 bars 
is full coverage) on my Nokia 6030. [0] Even in the basement where I 
tend to get 3-4 bars I've never have problems with call quality. 
> But for what I'm paying and how little I use them, they work for me
That was my main reason for switching to T-Mobile.  I use less minutes 
than you do (switched in March and still have about half of the 1100 
minutes I bought left), and for my low usage the price just can't be 
beat. [1]  When I switched I knew I'd be going to a prepaid plan, and I 
think T-Mobile is the only one of the big four that doesn't charge you 
some sort of daily "network access fee" on prepaid plans. 

[0] The Nokia 6030 is great if you just want a basic phone without the 
bells and whistles.  Aside from the basic phone/text messaging 
capabilities, it has a calendar/todo list, notes, calculator, alarm 
clock/stopwatch, FM radio, and an IM client.  Oh, and a web browser, but 
since it only supports GPRS and I don't have data service since I'm on a 
prepaid plan, I haven't used it. 

[1] Well, if I had better Sprint coverage, their SERO (Sprint Employee 
Referral Offer) plan would be very tempting.  If you're a new customer, 
$30/mo will get you 500 minutes, long-distance/roaming, mobile to mobile 
and 7PM nights/weekends, the usual voicemail/caller ID/call waiting/etc 
and unlimited data/MMS/SMS.  1250 minutes plus everything else is 
$50/mo, 2500 minutes is $100/mo.  These are single-line plans, so no 
adding a line and sharing minutes, but that's about it. 

This originally was just a normal employee referral plan, so you had to 
have the email address of a Sprint employee to sign up with.  But I 
guess they had so many people using the referral address(es) that had 
been posted online they decided to set up a referral address for public 
use.