Not one in a year that I can recall.

After 10 years with ATTWS I recently switched to T-Mobile. AT&T used to be the gold standard five years ago. Today, they've sunk to the bottom of the heap. Particularly their customer service has become horrible. I finally switched after realizing that hating them was becoming an obsession. I recently got my first month's bill with T-Mobile. It was ~ $900. I could not be happier to fork that over to T-Mobile. I think there service is a good value and their customer service is outstanding.

Without a doubt Verizon should be your choice as a carrier for Southern California. I know an engineer for Verizon that lives in Orange County and he told me that they have more towers than anyone else. In fact one of the TV stations did a test of the carriers there about a year ago and Verizon was the winner. I travel to LA frequently and when I used to be on AT&T there were many dead zones. Now after making the switch to Verizon, the only area that was a problem was high up in the elevated area of Beverly Hills near Coldwater Canyon. Otherwise it is perfect. Here in NYC, Verizon is #1 also. I believe that you will find this to be true in most major cities nationwide.

Verizon Wireles is the best domestic cell provider. They have the most coverage of any of the US cell providers. However, they are $$$$$ when you want to travel internationally and rent a phone from them. First of all, you are actually using Rent A Phone which has contracted with Verizon to provide GSM service aborad. They are vey expensive and their contract is really annoying because they secure a $300 charge on a Credit Card and deduct against your use of the phone. Added to that, they charge $2.99 a day for a phone rental $1.49 a minute per call within Europe, Asia, and South America. It is far better to purcase a GSM phone and buy a pre-paid card within the country that you are staying.

One advantage to a GSM provider like AT&T or T-Mobile is that you can take your service with you internationally. However, if you use your cell phone for mostly domestic use, then Verizon is your choice hands down.

Dan

Verizon of course doesn't offer mileage ;) - AT&T, T-Mobile, Cingular, Nextel and SprintPCS all do so as a good mileage addict I would recommend one of them instead of V...

Never had a spam message from Tmobile.

ANY phone that can receive text messages can reveive spam. All they need to do it pull up the FCC numbering database and send the messages to the email address associated with the number.

So far only Nextel seems to have had issues with this and I think they too measures to prevent it in the future.

A little off topic but I travel frequently to South America. I've been very happy with my AT&T GSM phone there. The first GSM phone I bought didn't work very well at home (Miami) but after trading it in for a better phone I'm happy. AT&T sells locked phones but I bought an unlocking code over the Internet for about $15.

All you have to do is purchase an unlocking code and you are good to go. No more subsidy code and you are free to place whoever’s sim you want.

I have been unlocking phones since I switched to AT&T a while back. Personally, I understand why AT&T and others applies a subsidy code to their phones; they do not want to loose revenue.

Frankly AT&T and the lot charge way too much to use their services abroad for it to make financial sense for me use my AT&T sim outside the states. Therefore, I have to unlock the phone which defeats the purpose of the subsidy code to begin with. Honestly, I would rather pay a few more bucks a month and receive an unlocked phone, as I believe that cell phone service is fairly inexpensive to begin with.

Dan

It's not THAT easy.

Some phones (SonyEricsson) require a cable to unlock, there are no "calculators" for them, other devices like the Blackberry and some asian phones can't be unlocked at all.

The most recent Nokia phones also can't be unlocked YET.

Ack, ScottC are you saying a Nokia 6600 cant be unlocked yet? Presumeably TMobile will do it for me or cant they do it either?

The 6600 isn't new! :D

And it's still a DCT4 series so the usual freebie calculators will work with this. I'm referring more to the likes of th 6230 and the newer 7XXX series.

That is true, my V600 requires the USB cable and special software that disables the subsidy code feature.

However, it is a fairly easy process.

Dan

Yes, and thankfully phones like the Motorola use the normal USB cable, the cable for the SE phones is a special flash cable... It's much cheaper (and easier) to send it to someone like www.globalmob.com to get done...

Im so retro :(