Cell Phone Plan Recommendations for 2003?

scubacuda asks: "What do techies think about the plethora of cell phone plans out there? (While accompanying a friend at the Sprint kiosk, I couldn't help but dissuade several people from signing up with Sprint.) When I told a friend about my new AT&T "minutes w/o limits" plan ($99/mo for unlimited ANYWHERE minutes), he talked to Nextel and had them match the plan. What plans do you consider to be the best, and when have you been successful in negotiating your plan down?" Ask Slashdot did a similar question during November of 2000. It's amazing how fast cell phones have been adopted by people worldwide, and I think it would be interesting to see how much more you can get for your buck now, as opposed to then.

Comments

Service and equipment is more important

[pauljlucas]

I have 300 anytime and 4000 nights/weekends from Verizon (where "night" starts at 8pm). I never come anywhere close to using all the minutes. Hence, I really don't care about plans. Verizon service has been great here in the SF bay area. Verizon does in fact have the largest network. The few calls I've had to make to customer service went well, i.e., they took care of my problem.

I currently have the Kyocera 6035 and it works perfectly with Verizon: 2-way SMS, free POP3/SMTP access, web. I'm waiting for the Kyocera 7135 that will be offered on Verizon probably within a month. It's a very sweet phone/PDA.

I can strongly recommend against Sprint. Sprint has the largest all-digital network, but it's still smaller than Verizon's digital + analog network. The upshot is that if you're on analog on Verizon, there's no roaming charges since they own the analog towers; with Sprint, any time you are on analog, you are roaming by definition, and pay roaming charges accordingly. Note how Sprint never mentions this in their commercials. Anyway, Verizon is all-digital in cities and is converting the rest.

I was in downtown Sunnyvale, smack in the middle of Santa Clara ("Silicon") valley, and was roaming with Sprint. Also virtually no signal on the bay side of 101 in Mountain View; same on the north end of downtown Santa Cruz.

Sprint doens't offer true 2-way SMS; they never worked right with the Kyocera 6035 (*2 was broken a lot), and no free e-mail/web access.

Sprint does tend to have some cooler phones (and some dumb ones with silly features like screensavers), but do you want a phone that looks cool or works well?

(No, I don't work for Verizon.)