Hacker News Reader

Comment by LandoCalrissian | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to me because people always say this is a huge issue with T-Mobile. I've been with them for a decade now, and have had very little coverage problems. I've been across a lot of the country and the two places I can actively remember where I got zero coverage was in northern Minnesota and Death Valley.

Their data does get a little flaky the when out of fairly populated areas, but I have seen this improving very quickly and can make many long drives with full data coverage.

I don't know, I think it might just be marketing.

View on HN

There's a hole in their network that contains my apartment and office in downtown Austin.

>the two places I can actively remember where I got zero coverage was in northern Minnesota

I took the Empire Builder recently, which basically skitters along the Northern border from Chicago to Seattle/Portland, and T-Mo coverage was nil for the bulk of the trip. Can't say I really minded, though.

Usually coverage is fine.

Could be different phones and the bands they support, in part. My brother and I are both on T-Mobile, but he gets better data coverage in the U.S. (we both get perfectly fine voice coverage). I have the "Global" version Moto G, which doesn't support either of: 1) any of the 4g/LTE bands, or 2) the 1700 MHz AWS band on which a lot of T-Mobile's 3g coverage is located. (The U.S.-version Moto G does support 1700, but then isn't usable for 3g in Europe, because it lacks 900/2100.) Whereas he has a Nexus 5, which supports LTE, giving him 4g coverage in some areas where my phone falls back to either EDGE, or no data at all.

I have their pre-paid plan, which apparently doesn't get me the "Service Partner" coverage, so there's a large band on the flyovers that I have zero reception in.

You're correct though, around my city and most cities I've been too domestically, I've found the coverage to be pretty good. Either way, the cost and ease have kept me on their program even with the occasional coverage gaps. But somebody routinely out for non-metro trips might not like it.

http://www.t-mobile.com/coverage.html

It's been my experience that there's not much difference between AT&T and T-Mobile overall. Which one is better just depends on where you spend most of your time. People with Verizon seem to get a signal virtually everywhere.

On the I-5 pacific corridor during our drive last summer from CA->WA and back, I got bupkis coverage for TMobile data in most of northern california and oregon (and call coverage was spotty). However, our Verizon 4G iPad also had weak/no coverage in may of the same places.

However, I would never go back to ATT/VZ absent a major change in their behavior. Happy TMO customer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com