IIRC, there are really only four player in the cell transmission business(Verizon, A. T. & T., T-Mobile, Sprint), but there are a plethora of sub carriers that really use one (or more) of the four carriers to hold their calls. Some, like Boost, are owned by the company that handles their calls. Consumer Cellular goes even further and sells A. T. & T. wireless services wholesale to other sub-carriers.
Do these sub-carriers get the same service from their provider as the provider gives to their own customers? When traffic is heavy, does Verizon give its own customers priority? If everyone gets the same service, is there a logical reason I should choose the primary carrier?
The technical term for these companies is Mobile Virtual Network Operator.
I’ve been using SimpleMobile, an MVNO for T-Mobile for several years and I have no complaints. Their customer service is not great, but I have no reason to think that it’s any better with the main carriers. I’ve never experienced any problems that make me think I’m getting substandard service. I pay $20 / month.
My sister and brother-in-law lived midway between Cleveland and Columbus. To save money he switched them from ATT to Cricket because they were on the same towers. Immediately they started having trouble with dropped calls, texts never coming through, etc., they had never had with ATT.
OTOH my other sister is on Consumer Cellular and she’s perfectly happy with it.
I’m not familiar with prioritisation at the towers, as described above for the parade, but sub-carriers in the US have always used cost-optimisation and been subject to prioritisation for their carrier services. And carrier service has always been a bottleneck – that’s why using low-priority and low-bandwidth and poor-path-quality services helps sub-carriers be cheaper.
If your sub-carrier is saving money on cheap carrier services, the quality of service depends entirely on where you’re calling from where, because the carrier bottlenecks and alternate services care evenly distributed across the USA. There will be limited or expensive capacity on one route, but cheap unused capacity going somewhere else.
No. While there are four major players there are lots of others in the cell transmission business.
U.S. Cellular has 5 million customers but is concentrated in a few states.
Cellular South (C-Spire) has 1.2 million customers and is in a few Southern states:
I think there are a couple hundred or so others, almost all with well under 100,000 customers.
But yes the MVNOs get lower priority–but if you live in a rural area that is unlikely to matter. The major carriers can also be competitive if you want a family plan.