Service providers

Well... The agreement between 2 companies were made in mid-March this year & it still needs to be aproved by Federal Communications Commission (FCC). They estimated that the aproval process will take about 12+month. Weather it gets aproved or not, and it looks like the deal will be aproved, we are looking at middle to end of next year (2012). If the process gets aproved, physical process of 2 companies merging, technical aspect & clerical aspect, will take another year to 1 1/2 years. Which means we'll see a single, completely merged company in technology sense, company of the 2 around year 2013 @ the earliest. Yeah, sure, their name might change from the day 1 but cross training customer services with what the new company will offer & cross fitting each other's towers to spec doesn't happen over night just because their name changes or one company buys another. that being said, I recently have changed my service provider from T-Mobile to AT&T for work reasons. My bill hasn't really changed that much. I'm paying just about same, actually $2 & some change less. When I was with tmobile, I was paying $92 & change for everything. Now I'm paying $89 & change for practically the same plan. As far as web, or data, goes, just because the phone has web capability on it doesn't mean you have to use it. Anything that is NOT a smart phone, you're not required to use & pay for data. It will say "non-smart phone".

I have recently changed to AT&T, about a week ago actually. I have used AT&T before & I personally was pretty happy with it. I just didn't like their iphone. I was with T-Mobile & I was paying $79.99 for plan that had unlimited everything, voice calling, sms & mms messagings & data. With AT&T, I'm paying $76.80 for 900 minutes that rolls over each month for a year, unlimited calls to 5 non-cell phone numbers, unlimited calls to any cell phones regardless of carriers & unlimited data. For close to 3 years I had T-Mobile, I noticed most of my phone calls are to & from cell phones. Then I have my mother's, sister's home & my work office's landline phone numbers as 3 of 5 unlimited landline numbers. For the reasons I use the cell phone for, it pretty much becomes unlimited for me. Here are differences for me. First, t-mobile wouldn't give me any type of plan discount for working @ place I work. Not that I think I deserve it & I didn't really mind. Plan itself was cheap enough for what I was using it for. With AT&T, they gave me 22% discount on main plan for working @ home depot, which they didn't have to but hey, at times like these, I'll take anything I can get. Which it brought it from $59.99 down to $46.79. Then unlimited messaging, which included free calls to all other cell phones regardless of carriers, was $20, unlimited data was $10... So in total before tax, $76.79, difference of $3.2/month. Doesn't mean much month to month but if you look at it at the end of the year, it's like getting another discount of $38 for one month's bill. That takes care of one more present around Christmas time, perhaps 2 presents. I've done a lot of thinking & researches & as well as t-mobile worked for me, AT&T does have better coverage. I'll say 90% of the times, it worked for me. Now in those odd places that didn't work for me in the past, my phone finally works there, too, so I can't really complain.