Belatedly, shE. Thorp and I are about to leap into the world of cell phone ownership and usership. We’ve never done this before…well, we did have a single phone (on an AT&T plan) that lived in the glove compartment for roadside emergencies, but we’ve never owned 2 cell phones and carried them around on our persons, and, y’know, called each other or our friends/family. But with my wife’s schedule and location becoming less predictable (she’ll be leaving a desk job and going back to school), we think it’s time.
So any recommendations for phones and/or plans would be welcome. We need good reception (AT&T is out because there’s no signal in the building where I work), but we don’t need a lot of bells and whistles…just the basics like voicemail and caller ID and such. For what it’s worth, we spend nearly all our time in Seattle proper.
I have no answers, but I’ll be lurking about as you get them. My husband wants one, but I plan to be the last hold out in Seattle… Nobody needs to talk to me that badly.
Woodinville here…we had AT&T here and got poor reception. We also both had a phone and ended up paying over 100/month for phones we used to call each other. We went to tracfones last month and aren’t looking back. Perfect reception and cheap. I think they use the Verizon network.
Here is a thread on pre-paid.
We had Sprint, but they pretty well screwed us around when we went to renew our contract. They wanted us to pay the same high price we’d be paying, plus full price for new phones (our old ones were crank-start). So I did some lookin’ around.
We settled on T-Mobile, which ended up being $25 less/month for our family plan then we were paying with Sprint. New phones when we renew. And I haven’t had any reception problems whatsoever, particularly in Seattle proper.
We’re on Verizon, and we like them fine. We have great reception almost everywhere – except at home, where we usually have to settle for one bar. When we lived in Wallingford, this was not the case, but in Wedgwood, we seem to be in a poor reception area. This isn’t unique to Verizon, though – when my father-in-law was visiting recently, he had similar issues, but I can’t remember which carrier he uses.
Customer service-wise, Verizon’s been great.
So my recommendation: whatever you do, test reception quality wherever you’ll be using your phones. We don’t use our cell phone at home very often, or it’d be a problem and we’d switch plans.
Yeah, I haven’t had problems when I’m outside, but its when I’m indoors that I have problems. The reason why I got a cell phone in the first place was to cut down on long distance costs and I can’t even use my phone in my apartment.
I’m not going to knock Verizon completely, but the lack of bars when indoors can be an issue.
Cingular is in the middle of a very large information merging process from when they bought out AT&T wireless. I use Cingular, however I’ve had a very bad experience in dealing with their customer service people. We dealt with several people who basically had no clue and gave us incorrect information that resulted in a lot of time wasted. The coverage is excellent though and I have never had a problem with getting a signal. So I think I just ran into some idiotic salespeople.
I’m sorry I should have clarified - reception has been great all over Seattle, Portland, & Tacoma area, in fact the only time I lost signal was when we went rafting about an hour outside of Bend, OR.
I finally broke down and got a phone earlier this year, for emergencies. I’m in eastlake - and have Virgin Mobile (prepay) which runs on the Sprint network.
My reception at home sucks. Things are more or less ok, once I get out of capitol hill/eastlake, but I definitely couldn’t get rid of my landline with them.
No, but if you have people over with different cell phone plans (no, that’s not a hint) or talk to neighbors about what they use, you should get an idea of how good a particular company’s signal is where you are.
Our apartment (and the area around it), for example, offers a weak signal to just about every plan. But I’ve been places with Verizon where Cingular or Sprint users weren’t getting a signal, and vice versa.
(Oddly, one of the few places in Seattle where we don’t get any signal is inside Whole Foods in the Roosevelt district. I suspect it’s the building itself, not the area, as going outside results in one or two bars.)
Regarding reception: I’ve got T-Mobile courtesy of my work phone, and I’ve had pretty good connection (usually 3-4 bars) everywhere in the area from West Seattle to the Eastside except in places like elevators or tunnels. Only problem was when I visited California.
I have used T-Mobile for years with no major problems. The only place I had problems was at home till a new cell tower went in nearby a few years ago. I went over to Leavenworth a few weeks ago and my phone worked fine.
I used to have Sprint, coverage was generally terrible to non-existant on Capitol Hill and North Seattle.
I’ve had ATT/Cingular for a year now, great coverage for Dowtown, Capitol Hill, North Seattle, all the way out to the sticks of Snohomish or Marysville. The only problem I’ve had is sometimes spotty delay with SMS or voice mail alerts when in Everett.
Cingular’s customer service is a step down from ATT, I had a double-billing problem once that tooks several weeks of faxes and threats from my bank to finally get reversed.
We use Verizon, and it works great for us except for one building on campus. Dunno why, but it’s the only problem spot I can think of. We’ve been happy with their customer service, too. The only reason we’d consider changing is a family plan with fewer minutes – we never use all of ours. If you don’t think you’ll use many minutes, you might look at a pre-pay phone for the first few months, until you can track your usage – it might be cheaper in the long run.
cingular has some great exclusive phones (Razor/Roker), but Verizon has got such great service always. I would rather a bigger phone while for verizon to get an I-tunes phone…and get consistent service.
