MVNOs... what are the catches?

[sixone]

Ting.com is a very interesting new Sprint MVNO. No contract, no commitments, pay for what you use and great selection of current Android phones including the Samsung SIII. There are no phone subsidies so you do pay full price for the phone. They will be doing a BYOD soon so you will be able to pick up a phone from ebay or craigslist. Worth a look.

Oh and if you need to call support, you get directly to a person and the person who answers works to complete whatever you are calling about.

I did some reading up on this today, and it doesn't look like Virgin Mobile is going to offer any LTE phones anytime soon. I'm hesitant to by a WiMax phone, if Sprint is going to stop supporting it in the next two years, which is about how long I'd expect to keep a phone.

Given the vastly superior speed of LTE, I may just jump to Ting and drop my cable internet, using the phone as a hotspot. I'll probably wait for the BYOD and pick up a Sprint phone on the cheap on ebay.

 

[Fire&Blood]

Things aren't going to get better until T-Mobile refarms its PCS spectrum to support HSPA+ and starts running LTE in AWS. Then you'll be able to take any AT&T phone, unlock it, and use it at its full capacity, making the iPhone 5 a very sweet target for T-Mobile to sell subsidized next year as well as any other LTE phone AT&T has.

The important thing here is that as soon as T-Mobile deploys VoLTE (Voice over LTE), the only important thing for most people will be whether a) they can get fast data and b) they can make phone calls and T-Mobile has a lot of LTE spectrum to do that in (up to 20x20 Mhz in some markets). They'll also likely be the first carrier to roll-out LTE advanced giving even higher speeds, greater spectral efficiency, and the ability to use unpaired sections of spectrum for increased downlink or uplink speeds.

Or in English, LTE Advanced with a significant enough bump in spectrum, should be 10x greater than the LTE speeds we see today (with a peak rating of 1Gbps stationary compared to 100Mbps today). Yes, you read that correctly, 1Gbps wirelessly.

Iphone has already been a sweet target for T-Mobile since 2007, they just can't meet Apple's terms, they never had a halo device in the smartphone era. Recent phones associated with T-Mobile are G2X and the Sidekick that's T-Mobile's brand recognition right there.


On topic, as a T-Mobile user since 2008, I can tell you that the catch is in coverage. I had to wait till late 2009 to get 3G in St. Louis on a phone bought in 2008. I moved 3 miles and got another job close by in March. Prior to that, I had ok coverage at both home and old job, now I drop down to EDGE 15-20 times a day at both home and work, sometimes losing all connectivity briefly, have 2 other coworkers with exact same issues. Prepaid or subscribed, you have to be lucky with coverage in most frequented areas, if they pass the coverage test, tmo is a great bang for buck. Also HSPA+ speeds and latency can be great on tmo so if you are lucky with location, LTE is not a necessity.

 

[Anonemous]

So the take home message (as with any wireless carrier): Get the fastest+reliable+affordable MVNO that suits your area.