Having been a long time AT&T customer and watching T-Mobile add feature after feature, I think we can conclude that there is little danger of AT&T competing anytime soon...

Regards

I had really high hopes about T mobile. Grabbed a SIM today to test the network. In my iPhone 6s I get LTE all over my house even the basement. Speedtests download of about 10 Mbps on the 1st two floors with my basement at 3 Mbps. Outside I'm at 15 Mbps. Overall a drop from the performance I get with ATT. Pop the sim in my wife's iPhone 6 and my LTE coverage is abysmal. I got one bar on the ground floor; rest of the house is 4g with barely any signal in the basement. Speedtest on 4g is about 2.5 down. So definitely band 12 that the iPhone 6s has is making a huge difference. So I would need to upgrade 4 phones to get the band 12 functionality. Tomorrow I test at work. I can live with using wifi at home; however at work I need LTE.

Fdw

You still definitely have to think about what kind of coverage T-mobile is going to give you in the places where you need it. But work coverage might be perfectly fine. I had a t-mobile prepaid flip phone in 2005, and we used to have to stand in particular spots in the house to make a call with it. Now we get very solid coverage all over the house and neighborhood (a planned community between Redmond and Duvall), but I do encounter coverage gaps in some shops and restaurants and things, and cycling out beyond our community - exurban areas, not rural). But I attempted Turtlehead Peak in Red Rock Canyon and got coverage most of the way up, and in most of the Red Rock Canyon area.

The T-mobile pricing is great, and their responsiveness to customer complaints seems to be great too. The T-mobile One was just stupid when they rolled it out. A substantial price increase, severely compromised hotspotting, and unlimited that was not really needed because BingeOn and Music Freedom made the biggest data consumers unlimited anyway. And now it is a really good value, and as close to true unlimited as a wireless carrier can be, so long as resources remain finite.

Coverage has to be taken into account, but if T-mobile coverage works for you, I think it's the best choice

Bermuda is UMTS (not HSPA/+, no LTE) on Digicel; Cellone doesn't work. I also had to manually select Digicel, using automatic selection resulted in the phone saying I had no service.

In Bahrain connecting directly to BATELCO for the second time in 6 months... and LTE in some areas.

I am not sure VIVA and ZAIN (Not listed yet) and there is a third listed company that I have never heard of here in the ME "427 06" as they only show up when searching manual, but connection doesn't go through, will try run more tests and update on the weekend.

Yeah Band 12/13/17 is essential on ANY network device (e.g. Band 12 is T-Mobile low band - interoperable with AT&T Band 13 now, Band 13 is AT&T legacy low band, Band 17 is Verizon low band). Band 12 is the newest of the low band frequencies and generally newer devices have support for this.

For your house, T-Mobile on POSTPAID plans can give you a free LTE Cellspot (Pico-cell) for your house. This will use your home Internet provider. I tend to see that using this has lowered battery consumption on the devices we use in the house. - We are mostly on WiFi at home anyway, this is WAY more reliable than WiFi calling.

I'll edit the lack of LTE - this was data someone else contributed

What phone do you have so I can verify it wasn't an device issue. Digicel *IS* HSPA on that network - the way HSPA works is a long as UMTS is authenticated it will connect to HSPA. I have heard of Digicel in early days of UMTS and then HSPA doing IMEI blocking on device mfr ranges that weren't tested on their network (a few other networks like Chunghwa in Taiwan did the same). Symptoms were auth on UMTS or HSPA then immediate drop down to a lower perf network (e.g. UMTS or GSM). Really odd that their auth implementation would even allow it to connect at all.

It's an iPhone 6S+.

I'm confused about the "One Plus International" plan for $25. It says:

Does that mean unthrottled international? Or is the premium 256k like on the new "Promo"

It means unlimited unthrottled tethering. The intl data is still 256k.

Well that's weak, because I already have unlimited tethering with unlimited international data on my SC plan, albeit at 128k instead of 256k.

That wouldn't really be an incentive for me to upgrade to the One.

But what's better about SC these days? I'm at 3 lines unlimited for $140. No discounts. I can't figure it out why to stay on SC.

For me it's $25 cheaper and I do not use up the 3 GB most months. So my data stash grows.

Then when I had to use up data because some of my stash was expiring, I'd have to run video or tether other devices and do app. Downloads.

Plus initially the limits on tethering on the One made it no brained to stay with SC, even though they were trying to get people to upgrade to One with free iPhone 7 offers.

For me there was an account based Stateside International Talk & Text promo ~2 years ago for $15 for all lines. Changing to the new plan would cause me to lose that promotional add-on feature.

Just spent a week in Barcelona and my Pixel with Google Fi worked great. Fast and reliable.