Coverage does vary by location but T-Mobile coverage is in a lot less locations and this is a drawback.
Weaker reception in buildings doesn't vary based on location. The band T-Mobile uses doesn't work in buildings as well as other providers.
Funny that, since switching to TMo I get
better reception inside my house than I got with AT&T. Step out the front door, and AT&T gets better (though not by much). Inside, though, AT&T couldn't hold a call, where TMo, for the most part, can. So, what does that say about the question of "inside buildings"?
... you have to add $10/month to get 2GB of higher speed (4G) data usage...
Well, that's not quite true. You get 500MB at full speed. Only if you expect to use a lot more than that on a regular basis (remember, using data past your limit, whether that's 500MB, 2GB or 500GB, TMo doesn't charge you extra, they only throttle your data speed down, so occasionally popping over the 500MB in a month wouldn't be all that painful) should you worry about that extra $10 per month. As someone who uses a fair amount of data (but lives and works around a fair amount of wifi), I've found that I've used a little shy of 1.5GB in about three months. I could probably get away with a 500 plan, but I'm on a 2GB plan.
Nobody I know has a problem with a 2-year contracts either. It's been that way for decades in America... it's business as usual.
You could always pay the full retail price for a phone on any carrier... but most people just take the discount up front and stick around for 2 years.
My wife and I were with AT&T for about 10 years. We were relatively satisfied, given what the rest of the market looked like, but we were well aware that our bill included $$$ for covering subsidized phones that we weren't buying. In those ten years, for our three lines (two personal, one for home business) we bought exactly three subsidized phones. And this wasn't because we didn't want to buy other phones, but rather because the phones that they offered us in the store weren't what we wanted, so we bought our phones as unlocked phones, at full price. So, if you figure that the subsidized portion of those three lines was somewhere around $15 each, for eight years. That's almost $4500 that we just gave to AT&T. So, when TMo announced their plan to release the iPhone, my wife and I jumped ship pretty quickly.
By the way. Hello, my name is Geoff. Nice to meet you.
Now you know someone who absolutely detests the subsidized phone business model.