On 2/17/2017 8:45 AM, Stijn De Jong wrote:
On Thu, 16 Feb 2017 23:41:10 -0500, nospam wrote:

tl;dr - coverage varies. choose the carrier who has coverage in the
areas in which you travel and at a fair price. do not count on roaming.
there is no single 'best' for everyone.

On Thu, 16 Feb 2017 20:13:54 -0800, Savageduck wrote:

T-Mobile does have much better rural coverage than AT&T, but nowhere as
good as I get with Verizon.

I've had all three, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile.

Out here in the Silicon Valley, coverage seems about the same for each,
although I had them in series, and not sequentially (except for a few
concomitant burner phones).

OMG. No way. Verizon is far superior in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area.
T-Mobile is useless outside the urban and suburban core, and their rural
coverage is far inferior to AT&T or Verizon, and it's gotten worse as
they've dropped roaming onto AT&T in the surrounding areas.

If you want coverage up in the surrounding hills and mountains of
Silicon Valley you need Verizon. I currently have AT&T, having migrated
from Verizon, and the difference is stark. I have an iPad on Verizon,
provided to me, and Verizon was chosen because it's the only carrier
that works in the civic center area of Cupertino. One day I had to make
a call from there and I couldn't use my AT&T phone so I used Hangouts on
the iPad and used Google Voice. Looks pretty ridiculous using an iPad
Air as a phone, but it worked.

In San Francisco, my sister-in-law works at a major hospital close to
the Castro, and only Verizon works inside.

Once you leave the Bay Area and travel out toward the center of the
state, and gold country and the Sierras, T-Mobile is essentially
unusable. They don't even try to duplicate the coverage of AT&T, let
alone Verizon. Verizon bought out Golden State Cellular which did a very
good job of covering rural areas.

Try driving over 152 out to I-5. You lose T-Mobile coverage just about
the time you can no longer smell the garlic in Gilroy and head up over
Pacheco pass. Then on I-5 south, T-Mobile coverage is very spotty. We go
on that route several times a year since a child-unit is in college in
San Diego. We had T-Mobile briefly in 2015 because we were in Europe and
I wanted the included SMS, low speed data, and 20¢/minute voice, and I
cancelled it about a month after we got back because it was so horrible.