I can only compare ATT and Verizon here in Austin,Tx. ATT is complete and utter sh!t. Verizon has it beat hands down. Ive used it on my drive from Austin to Houston and Austin to South Texas and ATT did horribly. It was slower and didnt have nearly as good of coverage as Verizon. Too bad my company decided to change to ATT because I really miss Verizon.
can only compare ATT and Verizon here in Austin,Tx. ATT is complete and utter sh!t. Verizon has it beat hands down. Ive used it on my drive from Austin to Houston and Austin to South Texas and ATT did horribly. It was slower and didnt have nearly as good of coverage as Verizon. Too bad my company decided to change to ATT because I really miss Verizon.
not sure what you are comparing with... but i have seen the exact OPPOSITE here in austin... and it sounds like we follow the same path. i live in cedar park, and have full signal +3G at all times... ive never seen it drop inside the city once in my 3+ years with them (now on an iphone 3g). true, there are large swatches on the trip to houston down 290 that get no data... but i have voice all the way. on the flip side of that... my girlfriends blackberry (verizon... i think its a curve, but honestly dont remember. shes had it replaced several times now) is constantly dropping calls and getting no signal. her laptop card is useless. literally. completely, totally, useless. there is no connection in the house, or in the car anywhere... step outside, and there might be a faint signal, but at painstakingly slow speeds. shes on her second card now.
and its getting better daily. we have a lake house at lake buchanan... none of us could get cell service out there (northwest of burnet) until last month... when all of a sudden i hear a little email ding. i checked, and sure enough... full bars, and edge network now. she still gets nothing.
so maybe its your equipment... but every single one of my employees, and all of my family has no issues here in austin with at&t. verizon is crap here though. tmobile gets a thumbs up however.
I have experiences similar to Abram here in Cedar Park on AT&T... the signal regularly bounces between 1 and 4 bars and either the voice connection gets garbled and then clears up or the data connection drops to 50k and then back up to 800k. Both voice and data constantly bounce back and forth so much that I recently canceled the data plan and will be dropping AT&T when the Pre is released. When I called and complained to AT&T about both of these issues, they never recommended I get my equipment checked out. Instead they said they would "boost the signal at the local tower" to fix the problem, which never fixed the problem.
Micah Ill tell you why it didnt work its cause they did not boost the signal. I used to work for AT&T and we new that was a load just to shut the customer up. It usually takes wayyyy longer for them to boost the signal in an area. I mean were talk 3+ months.
Wow good to hear all the comments from Austin, I live downtown near UT campus
I don't have any mobile broadband plan yet (just Roadrunner and my crappy sprint POS phone)
I hate sprint so much, absolutely no signal in west campus, can't even make a call from my house without getting dropped, 1 bar :(
been wanting to get an iphone though, everyone here has em and it seems like at&t coverage is pretty good, I'm no apple fanboy (I just have an old ass ipod and an airport express behind my living room hi-fi for airtunes, no macbooks here), but when they come out with a 32gb iphone it means I won't need my ipod anymore, I can sell it, can have all my music AND internet in my car, one less thing to have to carry in my pocket, and the "Remote" app kicks ass, especially combined with an airport express
unlocking for T-mobile is not a problem, but seems like at&t is a win
I work for UT in Austin and carry a Treo 755p (Sprint) for personal use and a Moto Razr (AT&T) for work. I've owned various Treo models on Sprint over the years, and have achieved tethered speeds equal to and higher than those listed for these dedicated cards. As far as voice goes, I consistently get better voice coverage using my Treo than we do with our Razr's, although there are certainly a couple of spots in town where my Treo will drop a call if I don't pass through quickly enough. That being said....as the article touches upon and what should be obvious to us all, there are way too many variables that can affect the outcome. I believe you'd have to do a survey using a pretty large sample of people willing to put their biases aside to really get to the bottom of this. You have too many different devices, coverage quirks, structural interferences, etc. to take anything from such a limited test. Other than the (more or less) static factors at play here (price, management software, etc.), the answer on speed is going to vary fairly wildly by place, the carrier, and the user's needs. And unless you're willing and able to jump around and try a few plans in the way and places YOU would, the only other practical alternative I see for getting "real world" results is to ask others who find themselves in those same places what their experiences are.
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I can only compare ATT and Verizon here in Austin,Tx. ATT is complete and utter sh!t. Verizon has it beat hands down. Ive used it on my drive from Austin to Houston and Austin to South Texas and ATT did horribly. It was slower and didnt have nearly as good of coverage as Verizon. Too bad my company decided to change to ATT because I really miss Verizon.
At&t has better coverage on the East Coast. Verizon is better in Gulf Coast and Midwest.
(Based on coverage charts)
@ abram
can only compare ATT and Verizon here in Austin,Tx. ATT is complete and utter sh!t. Verizon has it beat hands down. Ive used it on my drive from Austin to Houston and Austin to South Texas and ATT did horribly. It was slower and didnt have nearly as good of coverage as Verizon. Too bad my company decided to change to ATT because I really miss Verizon.
not sure what you are comparing with... but i have seen the exact OPPOSITE here in austin... and it sounds like we follow the same path. i live in cedar park, and have full signal +3G at all times... ive never seen it drop inside the city once in my 3+ years with them (now on an iphone 3g). true, there are large swatches on the trip to houston down 290 that get no data... but i have voice all the way. on the flip side of that... my girlfriends blackberry (verizon... i think its a curve, but honestly dont remember. shes had it replaced several times now) is constantly dropping calls and getting no signal. her laptop card is useless. literally. completely, totally, useless. there is no connection in the house, or in the car anywhere... step outside, and there might be a faint signal, but at painstakingly slow speeds. shes on her second card now.
and its getting better daily. we have a lake house at lake buchanan... none of us could get cell service out there (northwest of burnet) until last month... when all of a sudden i hear a little email ding. i checked, and sure enough... full bars, and edge network now. she still gets nothing.
so maybe its your equipment... but every single one of my employees, and all of my family has no issues here in austin with at&t. verizon is crap here though. tmobile gets a thumbs up however.
I have experiences similar to Abram here in Cedar Park on AT&T... the signal regularly bounces between 1 and 4 bars and either the voice connection gets garbled and then clears up or the data connection drops to 50k and then back up to 800k. Both voice and data constantly bounce back and forth so much that I recently canceled the data plan and will be dropping AT&T when the Pre is released. When I called and complained to AT&T about both of these issues, they never recommended I get my equipment checked out. Instead they said they would "boost the signal at the local tower" to fix the problem, which never fixed the problem.
Micah Ill tell you why it didnt work its cause they did not boost the signal. I used to work for AT&T and we new that was a load just to shut the customer up. It usually takes wayyyy longer for them to boost the signal in an area. I mean were talk 3+ months.
Wow good to hear all the comments from Austin, I live downtown near UT campus
I don't have any mobile broadband plan yet (just Roadrunner and my crappy sprint POS phone)
I hate sprint so much, absolutely no signal in west campus, can't even make a call from my house without getting dropped, 1 bar :(
been wanting to get an iphone though, everyone here has em and it seems like at&t coverage is pretty good, I'm no apple fanboy (I just have an old ass ipod and an airport express behind my living room hi-fi for airtunes, no macbooks here), but when they come out with a 32gb iphone it means I won't need my ipod anymore, I can sell it, can have all my music AND internet in my car, one less thing to have to carry in my pocket, and the "Remote" app kicks ass, especially combined with an airport express
unlocking for T-mobile is not a problem, but seems like at&t is a win
I work for UT in Austin and carry a Treo 755p (Sprint) for personal use and a Moto Razr (AT&T) for work. I've owned various Treo models on Sprint over the years, and have achieved tethered speeds equal to and higher than those listed for these dedicated cards. As far as voice goes, I consistently get better voice coverage using my Treo than we do with our Razr's, although there are certainly a couple of spots in town where my Treo will drop a call if I don't pass through quickly enough. That being said....as the article touches upon and what should be obvious to us all, there are way too many variables that can affect the outcome. I believe you'd have to do a survey using a pretty large sample of people willing to put their biases aside to really get to the bottom of this. You have too many different devices, coverage quirks, structural interferences, etc. to take anything from such a limited test. Other than the (more or less) static factors at play here (price, management software, etc.), the answer on speed is going to vary fairly wildly by place, the carrier, and the user's needs. And unless you're willing and able to jump around and try a few plans in the way and places YOU would, the only other practical alternative I see for getting "real world" results is to ask others who find themselves in those same places what their experiences are.