05-23-2007, 06:24 AM
> Big picture, they are all roughly equal, and their
> inequalities vary depending on where you live. It's like saying Monopoly Player #1 rocks
> because he has a house on Vermont Ave, ignoring the fact that he's got NOTHING on St.
> James Place, where Monopoly Player #2 just happens to have a hotel. Puh-lease.
IF we limit the discussion to signal quality alone AND if everyone ignores the fact that many LARGE regions of this country have superior coverage by a single provider then you might be right. But you're wrong.
Examples: In Los Angeles, Verizon is sh!t. In DC, Verizon rulez. In NYC, Cingular gets the best coverage in the shadows of buildings. Driving up the East coast, Sprint has the overall best coverage. Nobody covers a big region just outside of Syracuse. T-Mobile has fantastic data speeds in a region of Michigan just outside of Ann Arbor. Sprint has the best data speeds in and around many major cities, but is slower than any other provider almost everywhere else. That's important stuff to know when shopping for a cell phone. If you seldom left DC and cared most about basic coverage, you'd probably want a Verizon phone.
Big picture: local coverage matters.
There are also other issues such as ordinary quality of service and support. And the quality of the hardware that each carrier offers.
In the case of Verizon, while their coverage may be excellent and their customer service nearly tolerable, the determining factor for me is that they disable most of the advanced features of their phones in order to coerce customers to purchase inferior services from them as replacements. Often, their patches are done so poorly that they inadvertently cripple features that they didn't mean to cripple. And then they don't fix what they've broken. IMHO, that makes the company sh!t throughout their nationwide coverage area. Why buy broken goods?
Meanwhile Cingular/AT&T is well known to make far fewer modifications and even to overlook quite a bit of phone-hacking. They are probably the best match for an Apple device that one could find in this country and as a result, a Cingular/AT&T-branded iPhone is much more likely to return some value for what they charge.
So stop yer bitching about people comparing one company to the next. There's a lot of differences and the comparisons can be valuable to phone-shoppers.
> inequalities vary depending on where you live. It's like saying Monopoly Player #1 rocks
> because he has a house on Vermont Ave, ignoring the fact that he's got NOTHING on St.
> James Place, where Monopoly Player #2 just happens to have a hotel. Puh-lease.
IF we limit the discussion to signal quality alone AND if everyone ignores the fact that many LARGE regions of this country have superior coverage by a single provider then you might be right. But you're wrong.
Examples: In Los Angeles, Verizon is sh!t. In DC, Verizon rulez. In NYC, Cingular gets the best coverage in the shadows of buildings. Driving up the East coast, Sprint has the overall best coverage. Nobody covers a big region just outside of Syracuse. T-Mobile has fantastic data speeds in a region of Michigan just outside of Ann Arbor. Sprint has the best data speeds in and around many major cities, but is slower than any other provider almost everywhere else. That's important stuff to know when shopping for a cell phone. If you seldom left DC and cared most about basic coverage, you'd probably want a Verizon phone.
Big picture: local coverage matters.
There are also other issues such as ordinary quality of service and support. And the quality of the hardware that each carrier offers.
In the case of Verizon, while their coverage may be excellent and their customer service nearly tolerable, the determining factor for me is that they disable most of the advanced features of their phones in order to coerce customers to purchase inferior services from them as replacements. Often, their patches are done so poorly that they inadvertently cripple features that they didn't mean to cripple. And then they don't fix what they've broken. IMHO, that makes the company sh!t throughout their nationwide coverage area. Why buy broken goods?
Meanwhile Cingular/AT&T is well known to make far fewer modifications and even to overlook quite a bit of phone-hacking. They are probably the best match for an Apple device that one could find in this country and as a result, a Cingular/AT&T-branded iPhone is much more likely to return some value for what they charge.
So stop yer bitching about people comparing one company to the next. There's a lot of differences and the comparisons can be valuable to phone-shoppers.
