How do I get by without T-Mobile? Easy. It's my dad's plan, and he travels a lot for business. He's been with Verizon for something like 15 years and slowly added the rest of us. We have three iPhones (two 4S, one 5), an iPad 4th gen, and a dumb phone with 6gb of data. That runs about $250 a month. We had unlimited data before with just three 3G smartphones and the dumb phone, but my mom decided she wanted the iPad. Verizon forced us to change to what was a Share Everything plan at the time. No discounts for getting 10gb or more, and 6gb was more than enough with only one LTE device that hardly left wifi. Then my BlackBerry Storm2 bit the dust (used less than 1gb a month usually), and I got an iPhone 5. I didn't have wifi at my college apartment, so I easily racked up 5gb on my own the first few months of downloading apps and tethering to do my homework. But my parents wouldn't budge on that 6gb plan, and they weren't happy with the overages I was getting. So I moved to an apartment that included wifi in the rent and started using wifi more on campus. My LTE usage has dropped to a much more reasonable level, and my parents are happy with the plan we have.
Aside from the data, Verizon works really well for us. My parents live in Baltimore (before that Minneapolis), my brother lived in Boston for a while, and I'm outside of Kansas City. Ten-fifteen years ago we were all in Pittsburgh. Verizon has good service in all of those places. AT&T is awful in Minneapolis, and T-Mobile isn't great in Baltimore. Sprint isn't even good in Kansas City where their big office complex is. Plus Verizon works really well for my dad and the traveling he does. That's probably why he chose them in the first place.
I had AT&T for a little while on my boyfriend's plan when my parents were being restrictive, but I had to go back to Verizon after the constantly dropping calls. My boyfriend left for T-Mobile when AT&T kept raising his bill and saying his data usage was going up over his 2gb plan. He's pretty happy with his unlimited plan now, but he really doesn't need it when most of it goes to Pandora. He is grandfathered in at the $70 unlimited plan, so he doesn't want to drop to the 5gb plan. He justifies it with us having family in Baltimore and Chicago that we visit. It doesn't really help him when we're driving through Iowa though. He also has cable internet at home that is one of the fastest plans that WOW offers. His roommate is a computer scientist and has Sprint, so home internet speed is important for him.