Cell phone plans and coverage

jeepinmatt

jeepinmatt

Old, fat, and grumpy.
Moderator
Joined
Mar 24, 2005
Location
Stanley, NC
Been with Verizon for probably 2 decades, they used to be the best service so it was easy to justify the cost. Now that everything is 4G and 5G, signal seems to be crappy when driving in rural areas where power lines are beside the road, which seems to be like 60-70% of my driving. I'll be getting a new phone in the next week since the dual sim company phone is going away, and instead of just blindly throwing money at Verizon, I figured I'd poll the infamous wisdom of NC4x4 and see if anybody is having better cost-service ratio with other carriers. I have T-Mobile 5G home internet so they would be an ideal option since that would knock $15/month off the home internet, but when my current employer switched to T-Mobile about 3-4 years ago, it was a terrible mistake and we ended up switching back to Verizon. With that said, the world is different now.
 
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Switched to ATT a few years ago. The servic was as good or better and the price was great. Now 2 years later the price is through the roof and no one can be reached to discuss. Bob Akhbar promises I have the best price anywhere guarantee.
 
Switched from Verizon to AT&T maybe a year ago with work. Service in our area is notably worse. Had poor service all around DC and Williamsburg area all week last week. Mine was ok'ish on my android for the most part but my wife's iPhone couldn't connect for crap. Planning to head back to Verizon
 
Shreddinlettuce said:
Word on the street is t mobile uses Verizon towers in nc,
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If this was in the g'rage I could say a lot more. Many here know that until a few years ago I worked for one of the nations largest providers to pretty much every major telecommunication company including cellular, fiber, and copper. There are still active litigation cases of which at least 2 of I am a named party in...so I have to be real clear when I make a comment if its opinion or a statement of fact.

First this is a statement of fact - the above quoted post is 100% inaccurate. There are only 3 current nation wide network/tower/hardware operators. Verizon, T-Mobile and ATT. Saying that TMO uses VZW towers would be like suggesting that Ford uses Mopar engines in their trucks. Would never happen.

Now this is opinion - and not educated opinion formed by insider knowledge, just regular old conjecture and personal opinion. For many years VZW dominated the coverage map. ATT wasnt concerned cellular was a secondary or tirtiary business unit behind POTS/FIBER/Satellite tv programming. VZW started retiring less prolific towers to reduce costs, many of those towers were rural and were areas they were the only provider. The logic was, err seemed to be, if we are the only coverage - why maintain? Where are they going to go?
ATT got scared and started investing heavily into tower infrastructure pre-covid and continued after. On a national mega scale, ATT now has better coverage than VZW....none of that matters for your local specific pin.

Mixed in all this TMO decided to get feisty and try and steal market share. They partnered with some tower cowboys. They've come a long long way. They might have the best 5G tech going. They have (or had) a few silver bullets no one else did.

Beyond all that - its all a game and a bunch of MVNOs have better pricing with potentially worse service ...but contract language can also cause some counterintuitive advantages to MVNOs in highly congested spaces. But I really cant expand on that...
 
I am using Mint Mobile, they use T-Mobile towers. I switched a year ago moving away from Verizon where I had been for over a decade. Verizon's coverage started to suck big-time about three years ago with dead spots popping up all over where I needed it. So far, so good, very few service issues. The rate could not be beat on an introductory $15/mo for unlimited data, hotspot was maybe a 10Gb/mo limit. Had to pay the year in advance but at that rate it was a no brainer. Second year the rate doubled but at $30/mo for the same service it is still a steal compared to where I was with Verizon.

Adding color to this at the same time my company switched away from AT&T to Verizon so now instead of crap personal service I have crappy work service. AT&T was always OK but never great.
 
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All I can say is at my job we have to do cell surveys anywhere the banks wants to put an ATM in NC or SC. They ship me two routers, one with an ATT SIM and one with Verizon SIM. The engineers have me attach different antennas and they do signal tests. Verizon is consistently the better of the two providers. The Bank always have two routers in the ATMs and Verizon is the primary 99% of the time.
 

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Switched from Verizon to AT&T a year or two ago. Verizon coverage was not good at the house so thats why we switched.....AT&T put up a tower behind us so its been has been really good at the house....and probably better overall in my experience than Verizon was. Signed up at Walmart when they had a rep out there and got about 6 family phones on our plan.....my 2 lines run about $75ish a month with unlimited data and 2 phones that we had to get.
 
Have had Cricket for years. $90 unlimited for 3 lines. Never a price increase. There are some rural areas where others have coverage and I don’t, but that’s a trade off I can accept for the price. And international call clarity is great.
 
Verizon via Visible, last time I paid for 12 months for $225 buck on promotion, its 35 bucks a month right now for their top tier plan

There is 0 reason these days to pay the direct provider, you can save half the cost going with an MVNO. Hell Verizon actually owns visible and you can get the same service for less than half the price.

The only thing to keep in mind on some MVNO's is the data priority for when the network is really congested, some of them have lower tier data, but its rare you are actually in a situation that matters. If you want to read a ton about that see below. Visible is QCI 8 which gets the same service as post paid Verizon.

The only time the direct carriers get even close on price is when you have 4ish lines, as MVNO's are typically all priced the same per line.

 
For those of y'all talking about how the service at your house is no bueno (assuming you have wired internet there), do you have Wi-Fi calling enabled on your phone?
 
shawn said:
For those of y'all talking about how the service at your house is no bueno (assuming you have wired internet there), do you have Wi-Fi calling enabled on your phone?
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I do, but my WiFi doesn't reach 98% of my land. No service from at&t or Verizon at my place.
 
Had Verizon (SunCom + another they acquired) for close to 30 years before a series of fortunate ah-ha's changed that...
- After 5 years in VA (keep in mind we're like 15 miles north of the line) with ZERO VZ signal anywhere on the property, not much better anywhere else and as many stated... the fawking bills just kept raising
- The revelation of HUGE VZ dead zones in CLT where step-daughter worked at Levine's, exiting the complex at 0dark30 and have zero signal 🤔
- The in-laws showing up with their Q-tip/"free" phones that had decent 5G w/ T-mo

3-4 years ago, moved 5 lines to T-mo... great 5G/5Guc at the shop (still nothing at the house), little change once outside our usual AO and the bills haven't changed (less than VZ, even with new device charges).
The partnership with Starlink (which is our only *real* bandwidth option aside from crappy DSL & HughesNet 🤣) has been thoroughly tested around the property, and aside from brief delays, texts come thru just fine...
 
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