Leaving big red.... for pink

I've been with many cell phone companies since I first joined the mobile revolution. Some random company with a 15 minute a month brick phone, Ariel (the pre-cursor to T-Mobile), AT&T (which became Cingular and then AT&T again), T-Mobile, and Sprint (under the guide of Qwest). Since 2008 I've been a customer of Verizon Wireless. Last night that changed. This past week T-Mobile announced a deal where they will buy you out of your current cell phone contract (Early Termination Fee) if you switch to them. So I started doing some comparisons.

The really unique thing about T-Mobile is that the cost of your phone is a different part of your bill than the cost of your plan. So you can see right up front what you're really paying for. Most cell phone plans subsidize your phone over the course of a 2 year contract, but you never see that cost broken out, and it doesn't matter what type of phone you buy. Because T-Mobile is up front in the pricing of their phones you can see just how much that iPhone will cost, and can choose something lower priced if you want. Plus, as soon as you've paid off the cost of the phone, you're done paying for it, and your monthly bill goes down. You could certainly upgrade to the latest phone model, but you don't have to, thereby reducing the cost of your monthly bill. It's a type of pricing that is more similar to how the rest of the world does it, or so we're led to believe.

The other part about T-Mobile that enticed me over was that data is not shared, but it's also not capped. So for members of my family who keep their phones on wi-fi almost all the time, I can go with a lower cost data plan, and if one month they happen to go over the 500MB limit, they simply get throttled down to 2G speeds until the billing cycle resets. Sure it's not a ton of fun to go to dial-up speeds, but the phone still works, and you don't get hit with overage charges.

So last night we spent an hour and a half at the T-Mobile store getting everything switched over. My only concern of course is the network coverage, but so far it doesn't seem to be much different than what I was getting with Verizon. At least in my general neighborhood. Once we do a bit of traveling around the state I'm sure we'll find some pockets of dead air, but I'm hopeful it won't be anything too detrimental.