T-Mobile in the Bay Area

[Critterbug]

I'm considering changing from At&t to T-Mobile. Long story...
Anyway, I'd be interested to hear from fellow nor cal iPhone users.
What are your experiences, can you compare it to At&t? I'm on the peninsula specifically.
Tia

 

[gpz828]

We are on tmobile for 3 months and my wife is using iphone5 in the SF area and she get very good LTE and H receptions.
For me I think ATT has much more tower coverage, but so far her cell call and data reception experience is very good in SF area.
Hope this help.

 

[Critterbug]

We are on tmobile for 3 months and my wife is using iphone5 in the SF area and she get very good LTE and H receptions.
For me I think ATT has much more tower coverage, but so far her cell call and data reception experience is very good in SF area.
Hope this help.

Thanks for the info! I hope others find this thread. I'm so sick of having to do other company's work for them. I want service and billing to "just work", and I can't afford At&t's drain on my time and my bank account.

 

[gpz828]

Thanks for the info! I hope others find this thread. I'm so sick of having to do other company's work for them. I want service and billing to "just work", and I can't afford At&t's drain on my time and my bank account.

That was our reason to switch over to Tmobile. What we did prior to the switch was we purchase a $50 30 days pre-paid to test tmobile signals around the neighborhood and sf area and we found it was sufficient for us.

 

[Col Ronson]

my parents live in Livermore and they said the call quality was much better than AT&T (less dropped calls, more bars, etc)

My dad's LTE service in Silicon valley works reliably as well according to him.

 

[Critterbug]

Cool, thanks! I think I'll give it a try before I make the break permanent.

 

[shenan1982]

I'm considering changing from At&t to T-Mobile. Long story...
Anyway, I'd be interested to hear from fellow nor cal iPhone users.
What are your experiences, can you compare it to At&t? I'm on the peninsula specifically.
Tia

FWIW, I live in SF (not the burbs, IN the city).... my experience is based on a month trial I did in August. T-Mobile doesn't drop calls or have coverage issues, but their overall data speeds are much (much much much) less consistent than AT&T and vary greatly by location. Some spots you'll look at your phone and say "why in the world don't I have LTE?!?!?!" ... I think they were a bit late in the game buying tower space in the city, so they're at a disadvantage...

With that said, MY priority is data speed and availability, so is why I ultimately stayed with AT&T... if it was 2001 and the primary driver for having a phone was to place calls, T-Mobile would be fine. T-Mo is aggressively deploying LTE, so my guess is it'll be more of a level playing field in a year or so.

 

[Critterbug]

FWIW, I live in SF (not the burbs, IN the city).... my experience is based on a month trial I did in August. T-Mobile doesn't drop calls or have coverage issues, but their overall data speeds are much (much much much) less consistent than AT&T and vary greatly by location. Some spots you'll look at your phone and say "why in the world don't I have LTE?!?!?!" ... I think they were a bit late in the game buying tower space in the city, so they're at a disadvantage...

With that said, MY priority is data speed and availability, so is why I ultimately stayed with AT&T... if it was 2001 and the primary driver for having a phone was to place calls, T-Mobile would be fine. T-Mo is aggressively deploying LTE, so my guess is it'll be more of a level playing field in a year or so.

Ah, good points!

 

[imhereareyou]

I have never used T-mobile but I do use metro PCS and they are the same company now. It doesn't work everywhere my att does but it's a cheap second phone.
Like they said above, buy a prepaid one and test it out a month or two and see. Would love to hear what you think of it.

 

[kelly7552]

Just came over from verizon - crappy service

Do yourself a favor an see if you can borrow a t-mobile phone and bring it home. The T-mobile store is about a mile from me in Palo Alto and it has 4 bars, when I got my iphones (4 of them) we have no service in 50% of our house and 1 bar in the rest, I have to go outside to make a call.

 

[shenan1982]

I have never used T-mobile but I do use metro PCS and they are the same company now. It doesn't work everywhere my att does but it's a cheap second phone.
Like they said above, buy a prepaid one and test it out a month or two and see. Would love to hear what you think of it.

While TMO and Metro are one company, they're most certainly two completely independent networks, so the experience on one is not indicative of the other.