What are the Best Cell Phone Services in the US? 239
James Hewfanger asks: "Cnet.co.uk has run an article on the five best cell phone services in the UK. These include a text-based service that gets you the number of a licensed cab company in London, Google Maps and Gmail on your phone, a service that can tell what artist and song you're listening to, an online service that backs up all your cell phone contacts and a text-based service that answers any question you can throw at it. What, however, are the five best cell phone services in the US?" Wirefly's cell phone plan comparison tool gives a good up-to-date look of all cell phone plans on the market.
Re:Uh....WOOSH! (Score:1, Interesting)
No I didn't miss his point. It simply was irrelevent.
"Some of us are just looking for one that lets us make calls."
All of the services mentioned in the story are OPTIONAL.
The problem and solution to cellular communication (Score:2, Interesting)
A good example of this is expansion of cell sites. When a cell provider puts up a new tower or rents space on a tower they only provide the latest communication protocol from that tower. The justification for this is attrition. They are making the older signals obsolete. This will have you buying a new phone and committing to another 2 year contract. Luckily I have an HTC 8125 world phone that supports all the frequencies from 900 Mhz to EDGE. So, when I am in areas with older cell tower deployments I'll get signal, maybe not the latest and greatest but signal none the less. And until they start using a more advanced protocol beyond edge I benefit with all the new infrastructure (increased coverage area).
What I see as the biggest problem in cellular communication is redundancy. Cingular builds towers and T-Mobile builds towers along with all the major carriers. Even though there may be towers within a few blocks of each other. What I see as the solution is to separate the development, deployment, and management of the towers and their respective cell areas from the service that you choose to use. This way you choose a provider based upon features and cost rather than coverage since every service would have the same coverage. If all the cell towers in the US were brought under the control of a single company and a single communication protocol was agreed upon. The towers could be redeployed in such a way that there would be no gaps in coverage nationwide. The only places you would have trouble getting a signal would be if you were somewhere truly remote like say Mt. Whitney (the tallest mountain in the continental United States).
Nick Powers
The answer is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The problem and solution to cellular communicat (Score:1, Interesting)
All the carriers do this and it's no big deal. Most of the differences in coverage are just because not every carrier wants to be on every tower. They could, most of the time. But it doesn't always make sense for various reasons.
Sometimes the carriers to own their towers and guess what? They lease space out to the other guys too. It goes back and forth a lot more than the "us verus them" advertising would indicate.
Anyway, even if you took all the existing towers and linked them up coast-to-coast you still would not have coast-to-coast coverage. There are major parts of the US without any cell coverage from any carrier. Not just the uninhabited areas out west, but rural areas too. Ironically, both sorts of places which might actually benefit from coverage.
Once you get outside major cities or off major interstate highways, cell coverage drops to nothing pretty quick.
There never will be coast-to-coast coverage, by the way. Many of those vast unserved areas lack the wired infrastructure (phone lines not to mention electric power) to backhaul cell calls, so towers in the middle of nowhere would require HUGE investment in providing power (imagine miles of electric lines strung just to serve cell towers) and wirelines, or huge investments in microwave relay towers and booster stations. You're talking about a few hundred billion dollars to serve all that coast-to-coast territory, to serve relatively few customers. It will NEVER return a profit on that investment so it will simply never happen.
What it will take is another generation or two to finally give us a global phone of some sort which gets around the limitations of the cell tower systems we have today. I am not talking about today's satellite phones. They're not the answer. We need something that works anywhere, and everywhere, and unfortunately it has not yet been invented.
ZYB works in the US as well (Score:3, Interesting)
Runar Reistrup, ZYB
voice-based services (Score:2, Interesting)
Google Local: 877-520-3463. My favorite. You give it a city, category, and/or business name. It speaks or texts you the results, and connects you to the business.
Tell Me: 800-555-tell (8355). I mostly use it for driving directions, but it has myriad other features.
511: Traffic, public transit info (only handy if you're in the SF Bay Area or around Sacramento).
Re:Uh....WOOSH! (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically I text them the name of a local train station (local to which ever pub I am in usually) and they text me back the list of trains on the departure board and what time they leave.
So I can leave the pub at the last possible moment and still miss one and wait an hour.
Sprint fucked Nextel (Score:1, Interesting)
The reason I feel bad about it now is because Sprint bought Nextel and all the trouble started. The first thing was that I noticed state sales tax for CA, even though I don't live in CA. It was much higher than my own state sales tax and had added up to a fairly significant overcharge. So I called them up and wasted several hours on the phone until I finally convinced the fourth person I was transferred to that I did not in fact reside in California, did not use my phone in California, did not purchase my phone or phone service in California, and had not in fact set foot in the state of California for any purpose whatsoever within the past several years. Best question ever during this phone call: "Are you sure you don't live in California?" I almost lost it when they asked me this. I know what fucking state I live in, it's not even next to California.
Next bad Nextel issue: My wife lost her phone and I wanted to reduce the minutes on our plan as well since we weren't using them all. I called up and naively believed the bullshit their salesperson spun me with. I wound up getting shipped a new phone which didn't work and $10 more per month than the price I was quoted, and was locked in with a two year contract that had a fairly stiff penalty to get out of. Trying to get that phone fixed was an epic waste of time. The phone claimed the SIM wasn't activated, Nextel claimed it was. Finally, after a lot of time going back and forth with them on the phone they told me to just bring it to the nearest Sprint or Nextel shop and have them take a look at it. So I go to the nearest Nextel shop and the slimeball in the store basically laughed at me, tried to sell me a $300 phone, then told me if I wanted someone to actually look at my dead phone I'd have to drive an hour and a half away on a weekday during business hours to another Nextel shop.