T-Mobile Is Calling my Name

Other than not wanting to deal with switching carriers the biggest thing that’s kept me away from Verizon and stuck on AT&T is that 3G, even though AT&T often sucks in my borough, under the right circumstances (like around 3am before work Monday) can crush Verizon’s CDMA throughput, no contest, and because there’s just something about the ability to talk and surf at the same time that I find appealing. In short, in my head it’s as if CDMA is theoretically inferior to GSM.

But T-Mobile’s GSM. And they’re (becoming) HSPA+ which from what I’ve read and what I’ve watched on Youtube is fast and they’ve been doing a good job of rolling it out swiftly. They’re aggressive, beefing up their infrastructure like this, almost as if they’re trying to win your business by offering a better service and I like that in a company. Also they don’t have the iphone, their coverage is apparently good enough for me, I like that they don’t smack you with a service plan upgrade if you break through your monthly quota, instead they reserve the right to throttle you back a bit if you hit five gigs.

I watched Google’s Eric Schmidt’s 45 minute Web 2.0 Summit interview where he was sporting the next Google phone, the successor to my precious, sweet Nexus One, and I caught a glimpse of the screen which said T-Mobile on it. Google has a habit of being uniquely cuddly with T-Mobile, first with the G1, a few others I imagine, then the Nexus One exclusively for a good while before Google released an AT&T version. And now, apparently, this Nexus S which I just gotta have regardless of where in relation to zero all these ATMs insist my bank account stands. Not inclined to sit around for several months hoping they’ll let me in on the fun if I stick with AT&T.

At the risk of sounding shallow I like that Carly Foulkes broad they’ve got in their latest batch of commercials, a fine successor to Catherine Zeta Jones, I like her T-Mobile dress, I like her hair, her smile, personality I suppose, I like her affect, carriage and gate, I like some of her modeling pictures which Google uncovered for me, I like her to the point that she’s actually playing a roll in my decision making. By what I just said I mean that in a normal, healthy way. I sometimes stop fast forwarding on the DVR when her commercials pop up, then skip back fifteen seconds if I didn’t hit play in time.

Before I take the dive, is there anything about T-Mobile you think I should know about? For example customer service experiences – how long they take to pick up the phone and their competency, quota or tethering ball breaking, excessive fine print and too many hidden surprise fees, huge ETFs and so on? Is it a complicated process to get one carrier to relinquish my phone number to be ported over or whatever to another carrier, or would T-Mobile deal with that for me? That part’s important as I have a 212 area code, the Cadillac of area codes. Is there anything about AT&T that I will miss? Is this not an across-the-board probable good decision?

Doug Simmons