Verizon vs. AT&T Coverage

T

tcr_pnw

New member
Hey all,

I've been a Verizon user for close to 10 years now. Thinking of jumping ship to AT&T for a couple of reasons. A few friends have done so over the past few years and have been happy but they don't use the phone quite like I do. Back in my climbing days, VZ was the only way to go having cell service atop Mt. Baker, Rainier and deep in the North Cascades.

It's been good on the water as well. Full 3G throughout the Sound and San Juans. Even had service out of Neah Bay and a couple bars out towards Blue Dot 20 miles off.

Anybody have feedback on AT&T's reception out over the water?

Troy
 
Ditto with Troy except on my history.

I'm Great Lakes area primarily, then east coast, and want a Verizon or AT&T hot spot for internet here, inland lakes and near shore areas on the coasts.

Any likes/dislikes in these areas for AT&T v Verizon?

Aye.
 
Have used both on trips up the Inside Passage. AT&T was lousy. Verizon was a little better.

Same is true in the marina where I keep my boat. The marina is in pretty much of a hole with close hills around it.

Neither service has great coverage where I spend much of my time, but I'd vote for Verizon.
 
I'm reside on the east coast but my job takes me all over. I originally chose Verizon because of their coverage map. Everywhere I go, I get good signal. Originally the other companies did not have close to the same coverage as VZW.

Now I keep it because the service is still good and I have had minimal hassles with their customer service.
 
ATand T in the san juans kinds of sucks. I have had att for years and it works most places in the seattle to bellingham area. But in the Islands its very limited and most times I get kicked over to Rogers ( Canadian Cell ) any where west of friday harbor. Even 10 miles from the border.
 
I use A T & T because of friends and Family, plus the early I phone, I pad adoption plans, and have unlimited still on A T & T. I have had to pick up a cheap pay as you go Verizon phone for areas like Lake Powell, and some other remote areas. Even in the Keys, I use a Verizon Hot Spot. So, I have to say that over all coverage on the boat, Verizon wins. But I have both.
 
thataway":17y9lvnz said:
and have unlimited still on A T & T.
Click to expand...

I have unlimited with Verizon but they are going to axe that if i renew my contract with them for another 2 years to obtain a new, discounted phone. That peeves me. I've been out of contract for over a year but my iPhone is finally toast. If' I'm going to lose my unlimited perk, I might as well look at another company. A friend of mine has access to a 15% off national contact with AT&T which is making me consider.

Thanks for the input.
 
starcrafttom":1rai6tfd said:
ATand T in the san juans kinds of sucks. I have had att for years and it works most places in the seattle to bellingham area. But in the Islands its very limited and most times I get kicked over to Rogers ( Canadian Cell ) any where west of friday harbor. Even 10 miles from the border.
Click to expand...

Even in Anacortes, Verizon will kick over to a Canadian tower but I never get charged. Sometimes I've had to call and just say where I was. Other than that, how is the coverage on your phone in the SJ's? More blank than bars or is it just the bars are Canadian?

Anybody have experience with AT&T offshore? That was one nice thing have coverage at Blue Dot while being the only boat out there. My 23 was dwarfed by the 7-8 foot swells.
 
With regards to saving money on phone bill, you can often ask if they offer discounts for member affiliation. You might not think you qualify, especially as they do not exactly advertise ways in which you can possibly save. We get a discount for being members of washington state employees (teacher).

Other examples to try.
1. Military (former)
2. AAA
3. AARP (seniors)
4. Your employer (statefarm, cisco, microsoft, etc).
5. Teachers.
etc.

Our discount is 18% off the monthly bill.
 
For phone only in the US, it's hard to beat the price of TracFone. I pay about $100/yr and as I look now, I have 1535 minutes on it. Don't talk much, ya know.

Aye.
 
tcr,

I use Consumer Cellular, cheaper than ATT, and month to month, which buys time on the ATT network, and have experienced spotty ccoverage in the San Juans, also. Can not recommend CC for Canada because they do not do international service. Good in the States, though, and you definitely will not get bumped to a Canadian tower!
 
We have spent the past two summers in the San Juans. Verizon has much better coverage, voice and data. I generally put my phone on airplane mode anywhere on the west side of San Juan Island or from Stuart Island north to keep from getting Canadian roaming charges. On the plus side, in late August, we started getting 4G coverage in Friday Harbor! :thup

Our travels have taken us all over the country (we don't use our phone in Canada - bought a cheap pay-as-you-go Rogers phone for that), and we have had coverage in areas that friends with AT&T have not. We find that we have 4G more often than not with Verizon, as well... and where we don't have that, it has been 3G.

I recently bought a new iPhone. When we figured the difference in cost between getting a discount on a new phone and losing our unlimited data plan, OR buying the phone outright and keeping the unlimited, it was to our advantage to just buy the phone outright. Figure out how much data you use in a month (ours has been running 8 to 10 gigs on average - WAY up from the 3G days when we used 3 to 5 gigs per month). Figure $10 per gig of data. Plus the "Share Everything" (but data) plan. We have an old plan that doesn't have a lot of phone minutes - they haven't sold that one in years. We rarely use more than 100 minutes in a month, so a plan that had unlimited phone minutes but charged more for data didn't make sense for us. Contrary to what I had been told, Verizon did NOT change our plan when we switched from a Droid to the new iPhone. As long as they are not subsidizing the phone cost, you don't have to change your plan. On the other hand, if you use a lot of phone minutes and not much data, a new plan would have been less expensive for us.

Hope that helps.

Best wishes,
Jim B.
 
We use Verizon and have three smart phones and four dumb phones on our share plan. We lost our old unlimited plan over the summer (willingly) and it actually saved us a few bucks. We don't really use the hotspot function but instead just use our phones as computers and since I switched to a phablet (large phone) I really don't use the PC at home much either. I browse everything in desktop mode and it works quite well for me. We discovered that we really only use a couple GB each per month at most and the overage penalty is so slight that popping over sometimes is hardly worth a phone call to change anything. Canadian voice service is expensive but works well so we use it very little. Texts are wide open in Canada so we switch to using more texts there and simply turn off the roaming data service on the phones and only use some wifi at times while up north. The new plans with unlimited minutes and messages are really nice and completely kills any anxiety about those limits.

Coverage with Verizon the best and I really think you are taking chances with any other carrier at least up in this region. I am not a huge talker but I am away from home constantly with my girls and I want my gadgets to work as much as possible.

We recently did a county analysis on mobile plans for our operations and decided on Verizon as the sole county carrier due to the greater coverage alone. This involves conversion of hundreds of devices so it was not a decision taken lightly.

I have been a customer since 1998 and also managed a business group of 35 phones for a couple of years and never had much of an issue with customer service.

I know we could save a few bucks with another carrier but my time is worth more than the savings and a phone without service is not worth it's weight in my pocket.

My next move may be a Sat phone but that would be in addition to the Verizon phone.
 
Another vote for Verizon.

I switched last year when AT&T forced me to get rid of unlimited data to upgrade phones. Verizon service is dramatically better. I've been in a few places where I haven't gotten coverage and friends with AT&T have, but the reverse is much more common. When I had AT&T I seemed to drop several calls a day, now I drop about one per month.
 
I miss not being able to have Nextel when on San Juan Island. Always good reception and never dropped. Sprint was good in Friday Harbor, but for the rest of the Island it was spotty. My friend had AT&T and often had no service. Verizon was best and used by most Islanders.
 
We have Verizon. Service, coverage is good. The best feature is when we go to Canada, Judy calls them up, they extend our coverage to Canada for ~$20/mo and when we get back, they remove the Canadian coverage.

Never knew we had to stay in touch with so many family members. I always thought that that's a good time to get a rest, but things have changed.

Boris
 
I use Verizon because of coverage and reliability, but had difficulties with their business office, when I first went with them. Promised discounts never appeared. AT&T was much better, but we had no coverage at our second home. Back to Verizon, and I now have the promised discount.

On a recent trip, got a heads up warning that I was at 75% of my data plan. A call to customer service upped the levels. Nice proactive effort (automated) on Verizon's part.
 
Had we taken the time to document the differences, we could have done extensive research for this post because we had Casey's AT&T iPhone and my Verizon iPhone side-by-side in a lot of the boating areas mentioned in this post. Do you know that Johnny Cash song, "I've Been Everywhere"? I feel like that's us! We haven't quite been everywhere yet but we are sure working on it! By the end of 2013, we will have spent over 8 months on the boat this year (either on the water or 'boater-homing" on the way to/from the water).

Last year we boated in the San Juan's for 2 weeks, British Columbia waters/Broughtons for 4 weeks, and Lake Powell for 3 weeks. And we drove across the country and then down Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway.

This spring, we boated in the Everglades (on a friend's boat), and then trailered our boat across the country (with a side trip to Hawaii for 2 weeks) to Prince Rupert, BC where we launched and then travelled 1985 miles on Alaska's inside passage over 3 months. Then trailered home a different route. The total just for that one trip was 16,268 miles, including the 1985 boating miles on the inside passage. We are currently on the St. John's River in Florida.

Had we kept a phone journal, comparing data signals in each area, we could have provided some great information here! But we didn't. :-( We did notice many times that one phone had coverage and the other didn't...but one service did not consistently win out over the other.

I originally chose Verizon because I lived in neighborhood in Southeast Georgia where that was the ONLY service that had a signal. Earlier this year, we thought about changing my Verizon phone to Casey's AT&T plan to save some money but we decided to keep both services specifically to give us a "safety cushion" for our Alaska trip...hopefully if one failed, the other would work. And that plan worked well. There were times when one service was clearly stronger than the other, times when one phone had NO service and the other did, and many times ... probably majority of the time ... when neither had service. But like I said, which service had coverage varied and there was no clear victor.

Now that our Alaskan wilderness adventure is safely over, we will probably convert my Verizon Phone to Casey's AT&T plan to save $$$. As far as safety, we have the VHF radio, our SPOT, and we will still have Verizon on Casey's iPad when we choose to make the data plan active (you can't talk on it but you can send text messages and e-mails). We are both grandfathered into unlimited data plans and we'll see what we can do to keep that going.

I wonder how many years it will be before the lower 48 has complete cell coverage....10? 20? And free wi-fi everywhere.

Mary Casebeer
2006 CC 23 - Dessert 1st
 
It's not a Verizon/ATT issue but marginally related ....

I wish some enterprising soul would come up with an App that monitored cellphone signal strength and GPS location, and rendered the signal strength in different colors. ...think how nice that would be at Lake Powell (and other locale's).

If 5-bars was Green, 4-bars in Blue, etc etc it might be very handy.

iOS already captures signal strength. GPS records locations and lays-down a Track. Now all we need is for some bright youngster (?) to combine what is already available and make it into an App.

Best,
Casey&Mary
 
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