Phone geeking

[danaeris]

If I'm understanding the websites correctly...

The following prices are for plans that give unlimited domestic long distance, unlimited nights and weekends (beginning at 5 p.m.), and insurance on the phone.

Note that Sprint has a new "fair and flexible" plan that bills you based on the minutes used that month, rather than on a set number of minutes + $0.40/minute beyond those. Since most months I use less than 300, but some months when I'm writing an article I'll use as many as 500, this plan has some appeal. This plan is denoted by "Sprint flexible" and the price quoted is for months where you stick to just 300 minutes, but basically, you only get charged about .10/min after that, in incremends of 25 minutes.

With roaming fees:
$54 300 minutes Sprint flexible
$59 500 minutes Sprint
$87 400 minutes Verizon
$92 400 minutes ATT
$97 500 minutes Verizon
$102 600 minutes ATT

Roaming free:
$59 300 minutes Sprint flexible
$64 500 minutes Sprint
$92 350 minutes ATT
$102 550 minutes ATT
$102 400 minutes Verizon

Unless I've vastly misunderstood what the Sprint Vision Professional pack is (I took it to be unlimited data), Sprint is far and away the best of the plans, and Verizon is far and away the most expensive.

They also have the best price for the Treo 600--only $370 if you buy it through amazon. But do I want to switch to Sprint? How much does their coverage and customer service suck?

Comments

[geekosaur]

Sprint: near universal coverage, worst customer support in the business. Many people go with them anyway, since one doesn't normally need to care about customer support.

There are a few parts of the country that only Verizon serves. Not many, thankfully.

[ebenezer.livejournal.com]

My recommendation is to stay with Verizon until Sprint gets better coverage. And yes, customer support is worth something; it is a pain to deal with bureaucratic phone trees and service interruptions when things aren't perfect. I think that Sprint's data plan is the biggest point in its favor, though I'm doubtful that you're enough of a geek to actually make it worthwhile (I'm certainly not).