That wasn't my point. Yes land coverage might not be good but having covered that many POPs means competition for those people living in those cities to choose between 4 carriers. Competition is good for the consumer as you are seeing changes with all of the carriers giving more data for less money compared to before.
POPs is a nice way for T-Mobile to inflate their coverage numbers significantly. Land area coverage is what really matters, not POPs or towers. Towers are interesting in terms of their network build-out strategies, where Verizon has the fewest towers, and thus larger tower spacing, which has caused them capacity and localized coverage problems, but that has little to do with the big picture.
I do travel but it is limited to cities as I am not much of a "country" person. And when I do travel for business purposes, my clients are all located in cities. Those places are well covered by T-Mobile.
Majority of the people, probably don't travel much from where they live. So having "more" land covered isn't a big issue. You can stay with your AT&T/Verizon's and pay what you pay for the feeling of being "covered" all over the US. For those of us who don't travel by car every time we go somewhere and maybe travel for a week or two a year are very happy with T-Mobile. Especially with more data for same price now (except for unlimited data users).
If you ever travel for leisure, then you WILL find lots of areas with no T-Mobile service, and a few without any service at all. The United States is a big place, and there are lots of parts of the country where you can easily wake up in a city, hop in the car, and be in the middle of freaking nowhere a few hours later.
The times when you're away from civilization, so to speak, are the times where mobile data is the most useful. The ultimate is to have an AT&T phone and a Verizon phone, although that's impractical for an individual to have. I've had the privilege of traveling that way a couple of times, traveling with a friend who had Verizon. It was nice to know that no matter what network was in the area we were going, we would have service if in any way possible. It is tempting to grab an Android Tracfone on Verizon to supplement my AT&T phone while traveling, so that if anything works, I'll have access to it.
People who value coverage over cost will most likely choose Verizon. Those valuing cost over coverage will go to T-Mobile.
The interesting part is where does AT&T and Sprint fit in? AT&T is similar to Verizon in cost but Verizon has much better coverage while Sprint is similar in T-Mobile in cost but is a little more expensive with similar coverage.
Your argument about AT&T makes no sense. It depends a lot on the area. AT&T and Verizon are very close nationwide on average, but each has strong and weak markets. AT&T and Verizon have very similar amounts of overall and 4G coverage, although AT&T trails in 3G coverage, with some EDGE remaining. I *think* AT&T is slightly ahead in total coverage when you count roaming partners, but again, it's really close.
Where Sprint fits in is a good question, although given how crappy T-Mobile's network is, they don't really fit in anywhere either. Up to now, they have been good as going after the bottom scrapers, which is why they are known as Ghetto Wireless, but now with AT&T and Verizon MVNOs offer bargain basement service, even that niche is weakening significantly.
Actually, with the new Mobile Share Value plans, I'd put AT&T as similar in coverage to Verizon while being slightly more expensive than T-Mobile.
Sprint can roam on Verizon, I believe.
Yup. Sprint can roam on Verizon. At 1x speeds with a limited amount of data, and apparently it can't hand calls off, so when you go from native to roam or back, they just drop.
