<p>We’re getting tired of T-Mobile and thinking of switching as our plan expires in about a week. Any suggestions? My sister loves her Verizon. My dad & other sister are fond of their AT&T. Both kids currently attend school in LA but S doesn’t know where he’ll land after he graduates in May. Any input?</p>
<p>We currently use very few minutes & do very little texting tho the kids are thinking of doing more. We may even just get short term pre-paid plans while we figure it out so we’re not tied to any company that might not have good reception where S ends up. We currently don’t have a data plan but the kids are fond of their laptops. Whatever we do, we would probably only need 3 phone lines. I might be able to piggyback on my parents plan, since they only have 2 lines with AT&T, but am not sure we want that.</p>
<p>I do have a work cell on a local company that has unlimited nationwide minutes & texting for under $60/month but somewhat poor reception.</p>
<p>Provided reception is good which it generally is with all the larger carriers we have had good experience with AT&T. We have had a 5 line “family” plan for our business for years. Occassionly there is an error on the bill or they have allowed an employee to add a service which they are NOT authorized for. One call to AT&T and they have made an adjustment and put a credit on our bill. Of course, we have been with them a long time and we have a very hefty plan. Several phones with data, text, lots of minutes, etc.
The only thing I really do not like is that rollover minutes expire after a certain amount of time. I’m not sure if that is the case with other carriers.</p>
<p>We had ATT and switched to verizon. We love it and it has a better coverage area. Where we like to vacation, we had a hard time with ATTwith either no service or roaming fees.
We have a family share plan with 4 lines, have not had any trouble replacing phones with the insurance. The customer service experience I have had has been good. They will streamline your costs based on your usage. With all the promotions that go on, it is difficult to see where you stand with the changing plans and if you are getting the deal as well as you go forward. They will help youwith keeping your costs down(thats an oxymoron). Since daughter in college, we text alot, it is less intrusive and just a whisper to say hello. We are very happy with the service.</p>
<p>we have a plan with verizon that has unlimited texting/mobile web which was cheaper than our former plan of texting and web seperate for one phone only.
<a href=“http://www.phonescoop.com/[/url]”>http://www.phonescoop.com/</a>
Where the charges add up, is where you have little control, city tax/county tax, state tax etc.
However, while I had been looking at visual voice mail, I saw that it is $2.99 extra ( plus tax) a month, so now am just looking at phones without- look at the phones each carrier uses, because some may not have the capabilities you want.
( one phone I tried out had television for example- but the touch screen was dependent on skin temp and I couldn’t get it to work)</p>
<p>In our area Verizon seems to have better coverage, but their phone choice isn’t so great.</p>
<p>We use AT&T Prepaid for three phones. We typically use well under 100 minutes a year so this works out well. We have a land line at home with DSL - the land line is $5 a month with about $11 of taxes. The DSL is cheap. We also have DSL dryloop at son’s apartment - no landline phone. He can make outbound calls using Yahoo Voice. We now have a few Google Voice accounts too. When someone calls my Google Voice number, it rings my home, cell and office phone. First to pickup gets the call. If noone picks up, then it goes to Google Voice Mail which translates voice to text. In general, we have internet access in the places where we are the most. We technically have data access on our phones but we don’t use it as WiFi is pretty easy to find.</p>
<p>Technology and services continue to evolve so we periodically reassess what we have and what we want.</p>
<p>We currently have Sprint, which has worked well for us locally. Most of Ds hs friends had Sprint so Sprint to Sprint calls were free. Now that the kiddos tend to do more texting than talking, Im not sure if there is still a benefit for being with the same company as your friends. D had good reception last year at school but most of her college friends have AT&T. </p>
<p>Sprint is NOT good internationally. They have only two phones with international capabilities. One is an expensive BlackBerry, which we bought for D before she left the US on spring break. Changing to the Sprint international plan is expensive and her phone did not work most of the time. D was in Paris this summer and her Sprint phone rarely worked. She had to buy a pre-paid French cell-phone. Sprint doesnt have their own cell towers outside of the US so all calls are international roaming. Her friends with AT&T BlackBerries or i-Phones had very little problems with their international calls or texts. Our Sprint contract expires around Christmas and we plan to switch to AT&T.</p>
<p>At one time we had T-Mobile primarily because it works in Europe seamlessly (they use GSM) and had only a one year commitment. However, we found that T-Mobile’s coverage wasn’t that great - not really any better than the Sprint line I also had and also wasn’t crazy about its coverage. We ended up switching to AT&T since it had better coverage and would still work seamlessly in Europe (they use GSM also) which was handy for study-abroad, vacations, and business travel. We didn’t use the phone enough in Europe to bother with getting a Euro-specific phone while there and wanted the convenience of just using our existing phones. </p>
<p>I keep hearing that Verizon has better coverage than AT&T in general but it really comes down to the specific areas where one is using the phone the majority of the time and since Verizon doesn’t have a reasonable seamless way to use their phones in Europe I didn’t consider it.</p>
<p>Finally, I now have an iPhone and only AT&T offers that at the moment.</p>
<p>Congrats on the iPhone. Everyone seems to want one but the service plan price gives one pause. Apple is working on a table that will work with Verizon. That might be interesting. I think that cell coverage has improved considerably in New England over the last few years. Companies are putting up more towers and maybe they’re working with each other where some are weak. I used to be concerned with coverage and would experience areas without it but that’s pretty rare for me today.</p>
<p>We are Verizon users. Have always been satisfied with the coverage.<br>
S2 has a Blackberry with internet/email capabilities. He complains that Verizon charges extra to use various apps. that Sprint includes in their plans for no extra charge.</p>
<p>We have both T-Mobile (the original Voicestream :)) and ATT. T-Mobile used to have a very spotty coverage in HI, but it improved significantly over the past 10 years. I also think the quality and the type of phone matters. H’s business Blackberry (ATT) has very lousy signal at our house, but D’s iPhone has a complete set of bars. My old Nokia T-Mobile phone has lots of bars, H’s new Samsung T-Mobile phone has one lousy bar which disappears when H plunges into our couch. Go figure.</p>
<p>My daughter has traveled all over the world with an ATT (formerly Cingular) plan - Russia, China, India, Egypt, all over Europe – and we have never had any issues or difficulties with connections or reception… other than ever-changing policies & practices as to various charges & available plans. She currently has a Blackberry with an unlimited international data plan, so we send email back & forth wherever she is, and she can easily use email applications like Google chat. Voice calls are not cheap, so we keep them to a minimum - but ATT has been great about giving me credits for any questionable charges (such as those generated by inadvertantly sitting on the phone and triggering the autodial).</p>
<p>calmom, how much do they charge for the international plan with unlimited data? I have to say that ATT cleaned up their act, and we had some pleasant experience with their customer service.</p>
<p>Yea, the consensus we’ve heard to date seems to favor Verizon, but S wants to do some research. We’ll pay for one (or more) extra months of T-mobile while he figures out what he & D want. They will get the plan they like & I may go to a pre-paid plan, since I mainly use my business cell phone.</p>
<p>I absolutely love Verizon. It works beautifully when I’m at home in SoCal and when I’m at school in NorCal. I have unlimited texting for an extra $5 a month.</p>
<p>Just be careful…Verizon recently changed the way they do their airtime charges. Used to be that they didn’t charge on Get It Now (their ringtone service) unless you actually bought something. Now they charge for the airtime as well.</p>
<p>They’re also very stingy with the ringtones. They don’t carry over from one phone to another, although there is a way to save all your phone’s data on their web site, then download it to your next phone. </p>
<p>They also do not allow several of the free ringtone site messages through…I know that especially myxertones is not received by Verizon.</p>
<p>I really like Verizon, although I 'm not crazy about the new way they bill for media usage. You have to be really careful with apps that search for updates - that’ll add up.</p>
<p>One caution for anyone on Verizon: When you upgrade phones, don’t wait too long to switch to the new phone. I opened the bill yesterday & found an extra $200 in charges. When I called, I found out it was because my lazy husband had never switched to his new phone … they charged us the retail price of his free phone. Fortunately, I got them to back off the charges when I immediately set up the new phone. The stuff you don’t know!</p>
<p>My new phone has a web button. Out of curiosity I pressed it and a browser came up working on something. I then thought that this wasn’t such a good idea and canceled the application. It charged me for trying to load the home page apparently. It appears to me that I won’t be hitting that button much or at all.</p>
<p>Paying for data is a bit foreign to me as I’m generally surrounded by broadband internet access. It amazes me that people spend $1,000+ a year for phone services but I guess it has value to others.</p>
<p>My D is moving down to the states in 4 weeks for College and I must say that out of all of things we have had to do (F1, insurance and whatever else) getting a cell phone is the most frustrating. Because we do not have American credit we cannot get a plan other than pay as you go. That’s fine except no one has a pay as go that allows her to use it back in Canada when she is home for weekends, no roaming on pay as you go. She will be driving home once in a while since she is only 2 hours away but all companies tell us that within 10 miles of the border her phone will go dead so in order for her be safe driving I now have to have an American phone and a Canadian phone for her. This is extremely frustrating and expensive. The only reason she wants a US phone is that when her new friends try to reach her it will not be long distance for them. The Canadian plan she has include North American long distance (no roaming) and 500 international text message sent with unlimited received and cost me $45 a month. I am almost at the point of getting her a 1 800 number for all incoming calls.</p>
<p>If you can piggyback off your parent’s plan, that is definitely the way to go. Additional lines, after the first 2, are only $10 each per month. Plus that includes unlimited calling between AT&T cell phones (and land lines if you have the right plan).</p>
<p>Otherwise, we are using the AT&T Go Phone (pay as you go). Kids are around $25/mo, and adults are under $10/mo average usage. For us, it is still a little cheaper than going for the Family Plan. However, when the youngest kid starts using the cell, the Family Plan will be the way to go.</p>