My Cingular service has been ok, it's the phones I have problems with I either break them or loose them and yesterday my phone got hit by an Ice cream truck

Mike

 

verizon sucks, it doesn't work in the hills at all...whenever my friends with verizon get lost coming to my house they can't even call for directions cuz they have no reception.

Cingular on the other hand has full reception all the time in my area.

I guess its all relitive as to where you live and where you primary usage of the phone will be.

 

I've had Cingular, T-Mobile, Nextel, and now, Verizon Wireless. Verizon has the best reception... everywhere except near my house. I live near the hills, and there's nothing they are willing to do about it. I most likely will switch when the contract expires because I hate having dropped calls at my house. I have to use my landline at home to make long-distance calls.

 

Cingular phones makes a difference with reception, try comparing with a friend that has cingular where your having trouble with reception. I usually refer people to high end motorola's (V551,V3,Rokr) or any nokia as they all carry strong RF signal.

 

FWIW, Verizon has been expanding their network, except in the ebay hills rapidly - It is about 30% larger than it was 2 years ago.

Cingular has an extensive "kill" list for the duplicate AT&T towers, to be completed over the next 2-3 years.

When you talk to Cingular, they talk about adding 200 sites etc, this is marketing talk, what they are really doing is killing off 400 AT&T, mostly TDMA radio towers and adding 200 GSM radios to the already existing AT&T towers. If you already have a dual band phone, then this will NOT improve the coverage and in fact coverage will decline.

If you have a single band GSM phone, then coverage will get better because the AT&T TDMA sites will be converted to GSM.

Cingular is not really increasing the total number of towers, in fact it is decreasing if you count the AT&T towers as part of Cingular, they are increasing the number of GSM radios on the towers they acquired from AT&T, which if you have a dual band phone, you are already using.

Beware Marketing Speak, it is sales people trying to sell phones - They get commisions!

EDIT: There is no assurance that the new radios will be up over the next two years. Cingular is having real problems with resources to install this many new radios in the immediate bay area.
.

 

I install the T1's at cell sites and cingular is the only one besides sprint actually ordering new services. This is for the peninsula anyways. Cingulars and Verizons networks have a high capacity for data transfers as the sprint nextel sites usually only have 1 t1 line and no backups.

My personal Verizon phone was pretty good (no complaints) until I switched over to cingular. No difference in service in my opinion from the places I use it, this again is SF to SJ.

motorola phones suck on the cingular network. My work nokia has full bars but my personal motorola has 1 bar.

 

haha... i have verizon and cingular.. yes, this is the only way to have coverage practically everywhere... i swear the providers made deals w/ eachother on territories.. haha.. the few places my cingular phone doesnt work, verizon works, the few places verizion doesn't work, cingular works.... most of the bay area they are on about the same level... 925 area by walnut creek, danville, san ramon, you're gonna want cingular, step more into the valley like antioch, disco bay, brentwood.. then its verizon time.... but most of the concetrated bay area 415, 510, 650, 408... it doesn't really matter too much... only advantage there is that cingular offers a lot more phones... but the only reason verizon has less phones is because they have more strict test on which phones to carry...

 

A lot of great info here guys.

Yeah...if I choose to stay with Cingular, I'd probably get the Nokia flip phone or one of the newer Sony Ericsson's.

One thing that I hated 2 years ago when I switched to Sim Card phones (had those old school Nokia phones w/o Sim Cards before), was that I kept getting calls from random people. My guess is that some person had my number a while back?

I went to the Verizon Wireless site as well. Looks like the coverage is pretty good. Spotty in some areas, but still very good.

 

I agree with you, the handset is really a big part of the picture and please do not forget that.

My 2 cents is to go with the carrier that works in your area and that fits your budget/rate plans etc..

Never assume that if it works for the other folks that it will work for you too. Some hate one carrier and vise versa, they the other.

This is a hard question to ask and good luck with your decision.



gino

 

FYI, one last thing, when Cingular moves all their subscribers to the new Cingular network, the coverage will be even better.

Some I assume are still on TMobiles network to date but it is invisible to the end user and T Mobile now is using the old Cingular network.

keep that in mind as well.



gino

 

T mobile sucks I've never had this bad of service in 8 years... Go verizon Wish I didn't switch

 

That definately doesn't apply to where I live. Verizon is the ONLY company that provides ANY service at my house in San Ramon. I'm in the Norris Canyon Estates and Verizon only gets 1 bar of service, but everything else just dies after a certain turn.

IIRC T-Mobil and Cingular use the same towers for reception. So I don't think you'd get any different service from them except customer service, which from what I hear, sucks for both as well.

 

Actually T-mobile does not roam on Cingulars 850 freq (former att) plus majority of T-mobiles phones only support 1900 freq therefor coverage is different!

Just my .2 cents

 

Also the main reason Cingular is leaning towards the 850 Freq is cause its penerates better thru walls and im sure Gino can add to this since he was an IT for att...

So to those who use Cingular and have an overseas phone or a single band phone your not fufilling Cingulars full network without that 850 band on your handset.

 

If you're still shopping around pick up a phone from ebay with no contract. It's amazing what kind of deals the service provider will cut you if you don't have a contract, just so they can have your business. The only crappy thing with cingular is their choice of the 850 band. A lot of "world phones" made outside of the US don't have that band. I've been drooling over a motorola A1000, MPX300 or A1010 but can't use them because they use the bands that the rest of the freaking world uses. I think there's a bit more to cingulars choice in bands than just penetration.