It’s been about two months since i dropped Sprint and went to T-Mobile. My experience has been pretty good so far, but there are a few ‘but’s in there. For the transfer I got an unlocked Nexus 4. The plan is that here in a while i’ll also get an AT&T prepaid plan and compare the services.
Price
I was able to get in on the $30/month prepaid plan for T-Mobile. Which is even cheaper that what I was going to get through Straight Talk. This plan is just rediculous! You get unlimited data and texting (up to 5GB at 3/4G speeds) and 100 minutes of talk. I really don’t talk on the phone much so that’s just fine for me, and I don’t think I’ve come close to hitting the 5GB limit on data (…yet ;))
Speeds
Where i live and with my phone, the fastest I’ll get is HSPA+42 (T-Mobile’s non-LTE 4G). In town, and once i’m in other towns I’ve gotten good speeds of between 1200 and 6000 kbps down, which is a huge increase from the 30 – 500 kbps i was getting with Sprint.
Coverage
This is where i think T-Mobile fails a bit. While the only place i’ve never had service was the same place most other people didn’t have service, there are areas where i wished me speeds were better. While in town i have great service and good speeds, but if i’m on the interstate or travelling between towns, often times my connection drops to E or even G — at which point doing any kind of music streaming is just impossible. Overall I would give the coverage a grade of satisfactory, but with much room for improvement.
With that said, I’m definitely more content with T-Mobile than I was with Sprint. I am curious though on how AT&T will stack up. I have friends on AT&T and while they have more and better coverage, I don’t think they get the same speeds that i do. I’d like to do an Apples-to-Apples comparison in the next few months.