gobluetwo

Recently did a test drive, and my BIL is on TMO with a band 12 compatible device.

Reception in my area (Chicagoland) still bites, band 12 not available in Chicago area yet. BIL gets no reception in my house, decent in his house down the street, and a dead spot on my way to the office. Road trips are brutal because they get no reception in large swaths of the trip.

Also, they gave me an iPhone 5s for my test drive which isn't band 12 compatible anyway.

IMO, VZW or ATT still rule in terms of coverage, but you're paying for it.

I am excited to see VZW getting approval for wifi calling. Hopefully, it's imminent.

tmiw

Sprint's gotten a whole lot better over the last few years. Currently:

1. If you live in a major metro area that's not near the Mexican or Canadian border and you don't travel to rural areas, Sprint is likely at least acceptable now. Your speed tests on LTE will still be the slowest out of the Big Four but your phone will be usable. You may have better results if you have a device that supports "LTE Plus".
2. If you live somewhere near one of the borders (like all of Southern California), your experience will mirror (1) above as long as you're on LTE. Unfortunately there's no low band LTE at all in those areas and cell site spacing isn't good enough right now to make up for that. As a result you'll be dropping to very slow 3G pretty frequently.
3. 1X roaming on Verizon if you go to a rural area, same as it always has been.

Long-term though it doesn't look good:

1. Sprint is at least several years behind the other carriers in terms of 4G rollout, if not more. (Their failed WiMAX venture doesn't count.) They also neglected the 3G network for a very long time and pretty much had to rebuild it from scratch. This costs money.
2. They also so thoroughly trashed their brand that millions will likely never consider them again even if coverage, customer service and speeds become much better than AT&T or Verizon. They'll need to rebrand and possibly change their name entirely, something that also costs money.
3. This money has become a lot harder to come by now. That means stuff like cell densification needed to fix issues in some of their markets will take even longer to happen, if it ever does.
4. Even farther down the road is that they still don't have VoLTE and rely on Verizon for significant amounts of their rural coverage. What happens when the latter shuts down CDMA altogether? Instead of at least having phone calls, texts and 1X data in rural areas, you'll simply have no service at all because Sprint basically couldn't afford to build out or otherwise acquire their way to equivalent coverage.
5. Speaking of equivalent coverage, they dropped out of the 600MHz auction. This is going to bite them hard later IMO since their current low band spectrum is so constrained.

Anyway, as a Sprint customer it's definitely gotten harder to support them even though I've seen the improvements. Perhaps the US market can really only support three carriers after all. We'll see in any case.

HDQDD

Just moved the wife to Cricket (who is owned by ATT and uses the ATT network). Her bill went from $97/mo to $35. Only negative is that in her case she had to BYOD (she didn't like their free phones). But for a $62/mo difference, you can have a pretty nice BYOD!

Unless you're traveling internationally, I'd highly recommend looking into the MVNOs. Much cheaper, and they use the "big 4"s networks so they have the same coverage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile...twork_operator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...work_operators
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...work_operators

tmiw

This weekend I noticed that T-Mobile SIM cards were totally sold out at every store I went to (Target, Best Buy and a couple of Walgreens locations, mostly). I guess their promotion for Sprint subscribers was too tempting to pass up. It worked out in a way though since a prepaid one online was only $0.99+tax using promo code SIM99 at checkout. I figure if my experience on T-Mobile prepaid is better I'll port over from Sprint to a postpaid plan.

Coincidentally, I hear on another forum that Sprint may finally be starting to roll out low-band LTE here. B12 on T-Mobile is still pending, however.

bhomburg

While this is theoretically true, in practice the Verizon phones are missing quite a few LTE bands, making them slow outside of the VzW network.
Example: the "GSM" 'rest of the world' - Blackberry Classic features all available LTE frequencies: 2600, 2100, 1900, 1800, 900, 850, 800 MHz for bands 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 20. Which will ensure that it'll work at full speed everywhere in the world where there's LTE.
The VzW model only has 700MHz LTE bands 4 and 13, which makes it fall back to HSPA+ or worse data speeds outside of North America.

Although the MVNOs only get access to the network at the 'prepaid' level (Verizon offers its postpaid customers better coverage, check the network maps!), I concur. I do this as an international traveller who stays in the US for about five to six weeks every year, spread out over a number of trips. I`m using pageplus (Verizon MVNO) on their "standard plan", paying just $80 annually for service. This lets me keep my number and the balance for a year.

TWA884

My Verizon LG G4 (VS986) utilizes the following LTE bands: 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 13.

krazykanuck

I've used Cricket for most of the last 3 years after getting fed up with paying AT&T $100/month (no more company paid cell phone). I tried out T-Mobile for a few months last year and hated it. Signal sucked in my house and office, zero signal on stretches of I-10 that I drive, etc. Also since they don't offer intl roaming on their prepaid plans, that wasn't even a benefit, so I switched back to Cricket.

I pay $45/mo for 5 gigs of 4G data, it includes Mexico and Canada data/texts/calls, and there is no discernible difference for me vs. full line AT&T. I can't see myself ever going back to the full line/post paid carriers. Give me my unlocked, off contract Moto G for $200 off Amazon and I'm happy.

When I travel abroad for more than a couple days I just buy a prepaid SIM which is cheaper than paying for intl roaming would be anyway, and I get a local number.

SC54HI

After nearly 15 years on VZW (mostly because of their Canada plans, which we wanted), we jumped to T-Mobile last summer when they rolled SCNA and haven't looked back. Our local coverage in HI is good and the spouse has had excellent text/data connectivity on recent business trips to UK & AUS. We look forward to using our iPhones in Canada the way we do in the US without VZW's price gouging for global data.

As for patchy coverage, we had plenty of that at home & on the US mainland. It's a myth that they're everywhere. They're not, and we experienced LOTS of coverage gaps on the continental US, including No Service, over the years we had VZW.

Yes, all this and a bill that's significantly lower with significantly higher data buckets. What's not to like?

dtsm

Not sure if this is old news.....surprised when I found this and I'm a TMO fanboy, LOL!
http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/03/tech...sumer-reports/

This might subscriber access:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/e...s-overview.htm

tmiw

Didn't read the article from the CR site, but it sounds like price and possibly CS are CR's primary considerations, especially since the MVNOs ranked higher and use the same networks as the big four. Not sure I'd agree with not giving network quality more weighting but then again, all four networks will give you the basics in major cities where most people live.

WIRunner

I've been extremely pleased with T-Mobile over the past year. Their coverage is not that far off from what Verizon is offering in many places. (Their covered POPs are all around 305-310 M.) There were coverage gaps that I had last year that are gone, their expansion with Band 12 has made a marked improvement year over year, and I'm paying way less than I was with my previous carrier (and a lot less than if I had Verizon.)

I've never been a fan of Verizon, they charge a premium for a perceived network image (there are plenty of places where they are superior, but when Alltel was around they had the better network, if you go to a U.S. Cellular market, they have the better network, CSpire has the better network in their markets.)

TWA884

From your linked article:

nkedel

HSPA+ isn't that bad; in practice, LTE and channel-bonded HSPA+ often achieve very similar speeds. Verizon LTE has been particularly bad around here -- I rarely get over 7-10Mbps on my work phone, which is about what I averaged on T-Mo HSPA+ ... and I get about twice that on T-Mobile LTE.

OTOH, I think I'm in a particularly good area for T-Mo and especially for the HSPA+ where there are a lot of 1900mhz spectrum they got from AT&T when the merger fell through.

I've never gotten LTE abroad, but I haven't missed it.

WIRunner

They're in the process of refarming much of the HSDPA in favour of LTE. There are obvious spectral advantages of going with LTE.

I know in Canada and Mexico you get LTE roaming in a "roam-like-home" fashion. For some reason I'm thinking that LTE data is a paid option.

nkedel

Yes, there are huge advantages from the carrier perspective, and on average LTE usually is the better performer from the customer perspective as well. My point was simply that for roaming where the LTE bands are going to present an issue outside the US, falling back to HSPA really isn't that bad (at least for the next few years until those networks go LTE-only.)

My international travel tends to be in Asia, and tends to involve a local SIM except for Japan. The free roaming was invaluable my first day there, and I got a paid 1-week 200MB pack after that -- I blew through the 200MB pretty quickly but the level of throttling after that was notably less even if it was still clearly throttled.