Cell phone coverage: who do you use and how is your coverage in Minneapolis?

I have Sprint and my service has been terrible, much more so recently. I live about a mile south of downtown Minneapolis, and I can only get about 2-3 bars of service at home. Voice service is terrible. My coverage when traveling is also pretty poor, and I have been getting a lot of dropped calls when driving around the metro.

So what provider do you use? How is your service around Minneapolis, specifically downtown or close to downtown?

I know that Verizon is normally the unanimous best choice for coverage (albeit most expensive), but I saw some negative reviews online for Minneapolis. I'm just trying to validate what service provider has truly been decent.

Thanks!

 

I had Sprint up until a few months ago. Never had good service at my place just west of downtown on Glenwood ave. Switched to T mobile and im getting 4g service where i wouldnt even be able to make a call with Sprint.

Up north is another story though. I cant hardly get service with t mobile up at my cabin just north of Garrison. Sprint was pretty decent up there.

I guess it all depends on where you are. Although, T mobile is cheaper, so that was the main reason for me switching providers.

 

Thanks guys - I had T-mo a long time ago, and it was the same experience. I used to travel around the rural MN and ND, and Sprint was pretty good. Now I'm mainly in Minneapolis and traveling to larger cities across the US.

I'm still curious to hear some feedback from Verizon and ATT users...

 

I've had att Sprint and Verizon. Verizon has best coverage and 4g coverage of the 3 I used. Sprint had the best customer service(this was 5yrs ago) att at that one was cheapest but their phone selection was terrible and service was mediocre. I'd go with Verizon as long as your tech savy and can fix your own problems.

 

Is your company willing to subsidize you going to another carrier? If not, you may consider calling Sprint and complaining about service until you get an in-home cell tower. They have been known to give these away for free in poor service areas and I know your tower is a huge source of problems. Both of my brothers live close to you and they have the same issues you do. I have had 0 problems in my area for phone calls.

That being said, my family plan is considering moving to either Verizon or ATT.

 

Yep, I'm going through the approval process right now to try to use a different carrier.

I tried calling spring to get the in-home cell booster, but there were going to charge for it, and I'd have to route it through my company for approval...not worth the hassle and doesn't solve issues outside of the home.

Sounds like the west side of 35W is cursed for Sprint users! They told me once when I had called in that they were working on the main tower that I connect to, but that the maintenance would be completed soon. That was back in April lol.

 

They have a stump speech and they use it often. They are trying to avoid people leaving in droves, which would happen if they admitted "our service is ****".

If you can get to another carrier, I bet you'll be satisfied with either ATT or Verizon. You'll have fixed data plans but depending on how much your company is welling to pay, you should be fine.

 

Verizon has never let me down. Great coverage even way up in the B.W. Sometimes customers service can be very trying on your patience. They have also been very helpful.

 

I carry a Verizon Samsung S3 for work and an AT&T Moto X for personal use daily. I always have both phones with me and will sometimes check my signals.
In downtown Minneapolis my AT&T phone has by far better reception. 4g LTE all the time where my Verizon phone is constantly bouncing around. In St. Michael it is a wash, both about the same. I've had AT&T since 1998, and have had numerous Verizon phones for different jobs. In my experience with traveling and whatever, I seem to have the best coverage with my AT&T phones than I have with Verizon.

 

^^Thanks for the info Glen.

I actually found a really neat website: RootMetrics. They are a 3rd party that frequently tests the coverage and peformance of the different cell phone providers for various markets in the US. They also have a very detailed coverage map that shows specific coverage (call performance, data speed, connection type available) for each provider, down to the street level. Here is their website: www.rootmetrics.com/us

And no surprise, the coverage map for Sprint shows a big red spot right over where I live. If only I had the Galaxy S4 with wifi calling

 

I had verizon for about 12 years. Good service, just expensive like previously stated.

I switched to tmobile because I was starting a family plan, and needed to add the misses on the contract too. The value of the unlimited plan of what tmo has to offer works for me right now. I don't do a whole lot of traveling to rural areas. PLUS, now a days more and more phones are becoming supported by WIFI-calling. So making calls at home and work will be less that insufferable anymore once we both upgrade to new phones we have been eyeing. For what it is worth... I don't make a whole lot of calls and just text and use data. So it works pretty well for me. The way my building is for my home and work makes for a whole lot of signal interference with how it was built and there being steel in the walls/bricks.

I had to call tmobile for a bill once and inquired about the signal booster and made it very clear no apps that I have seen with the nexus 4 or iphone 5. so we have a in home signal booster. It does a mediocre job. Other things to consider that each phones radio antennas will vary on the amount of coverage too.

I am feeling more reluctant to switch carriers because of the poor signal at home and work to just live with it after I hear how crummy sprints service is. I like having an unlimited plan, and not having to worry about overages.

I will be looking for the Google Nexus 6 when it comes out, or I think it might also be codenamed the Motorola 'Shamu' . So hopefully Tmobile will be supporting it.

Hope this gives you a little more insight to what you are looking for, TMF.

 

Thanks man, appreciate the info. You bring up a good point about the wifi calling...I remember from several years ago that T-Mobile offered wifi calling (which was a life saver for me at the time), while most other carriers kept wifi calling very restricted, if allowing it at all.

Sprint allows wifi calling, but only on certain phones. The "Sprint Spark" version of the Galaxy S4 offers wifi calling...which I don't have. Do you have any idea if all T-Mobile phones allow wifi calling? I might need to do some more research on this topic with all of the providers.

 

@TMF, how much data do you use on average per month?

@tehfuzz, I saw a rumor a while ago that the next Nexus phone was only being released on ATT and Verizon but that doesn't really seem in line with their M.O. on the "5"

 

They had a list. Most phones being supported. Just so happened the iphone 5 and n4 ( the ones we had ) werent supported at the time.

@Curry we will have to see when it gets announced ~ next month. Very excited.

 

• I have a family plan with Verizon.
• It is my wife, my brother, and I.
• We've been on it for ~10 years.
• We're grandfathered in on unlimited data.
• We use about 20GB/month combined.

The price is high, and we all have to buy phones at full price (~$1600 when my wife and I got a Galaxy S4 and iPhone 5 last year), but the coverage and unlimited data are great. I was very close to switching us over to T-Mobile's unlimited data plan because it's a lot cheaper, but the coverage isn't nearly as good so I decided against it.

 

I saw that its also rumored to have a 5.9in screen. They can go get ****ed if that's true.

That's a lot of porn!

 

My wife usually uses about 60% of that...

 

I'm normally under 2GB, but I'm pretty liberal with the data usage, so some months I may be over. I'm sure I could could always keep it under 2GB if I needed to.

Over the last several months, I've been flying somewhere almost every week. But when I travel, I'm almost always in major cities.

Interesting feedback about the coverage maps...the RootMetrics maps are pretty spot on for Sprint and what I experience, but I'm sure others could be off. I turned on mobile data for my iPad though, which is Verizon, and I had 4 out of 5 bars of 4G at home, which is what the RootMetrics map displayed.

I'll have to look into Ting too. I host a ton of conference calls from my home office where I have wifi, and that's one of the main problem areas. I've briefly tried VOIP with google voice on my laptop, but the quality is not clear enough. Probably better than terrible cell service though lol.

At the end of the day, several 3rd parties put Sprint at the bottom of all functionality areas, so no matter what I get, it should be better. I'm inspired by T-mobile though due to their wide availability of wifi calling phones and surprisingly fast data speeds (yet call quality in #1 for me).

Or I could just go old skool and have a land line installed at home lol.

 

You could also use your Google Voice number for business calls. If you used that number, you could forward incoming calls to your phone or your computer.

 

The number isn't the issue, its the call quality. Google voice is OK, but I think a cell phone is still a bit more clear.

 

You'll have similar results with WIFI calling. Get a good headset, you'll be fine.

 

T-Mobile is generally fantastic if you're in major metro areas. The 4G LTE service around the cities is great, and the voice quality is excellent. For a while, when they were getting all snuggly with AT&T, they even had really good coverage way out in the backwoods, anywhere AT&T did. But then they called off the wedding and started acting like spiteful ex-lovers and now roaming onto AT&T is a painful proposition (2G, 50MB/month "roaming" data).

AT&T is fairly broadly available, speeds are usually kinda lame, voice quality is good but I drop a lot more calls with them than with T-Mob.

Verizon is king of coverage, they have service in places you'd swear no human ever went. Voice quality straight up sucks (limitation on bandwidth with the technology they use for voice, doesn't matter the signal strength), but who ever talks to anyone else anymore? Speeds can be phenominal (My Verizon 4G LTE phone would outrun my Concast broadband consistently). But their plans suck and their phones won't interoperate with other carriers or work well overseas (CDMA vs GSM).

Sprint was so bad the last time I looked that I returned the phone like a week later. That was a while back, but I don't hear many happy Sprint customers.

My wife and I moved to T-Mobile from AT&T (her) and Verizon (me) a little over a year ago. We love the phones as long as we're in the cities, and I love my unlimited 4G data, but as soon as we leave town we start hating them. We will probably bite the bullet and pay the Verizon toll eventually. I still have an AT&T phone for work, and it's pretty good for coverage, but not near as good as Verizon.

 

Very interesting that the call quality itself is sub par...I wouldn't think there would be a huge difference in the voice quality itself, or perhaps it is more a result of the phone vs. the service.

 

As of a couple generations ago for the Verizon iPhones (when they went 4G-capable?), they can take a GSM SIM card when you travel overseas.
And from what I remember reading, the call quality on Verizon is supposed to get way better in the next couple(?) of years when they go from CDMA to Voice over LTE aka VoLTE. Not sure exactly what the rollout schedule is for this and/or when it will get to our area, haven't checked on that in a while... Actually here's an updated press release/article: http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/26/6066201/verizon-volte-hd-voice-video-calling-launch

 

No, it's the underlying technology.

CDMA has no real hard limit on the number of calls it can handle from a single tower, it just gives each call less and less bandwidth as it fills up. GSM actually defines a bandwidth for a voice call and if it doesn't have it at a given tower, you simply can't complete the call. This is why people on AT&T complain that they get calls dropped more often, especially around large events. Move from one cell tower to another and the new one is too full? Dropped. With Verizon/CDMA, the quality of the call just goes to hell. For most people this might not be a huge deal. Me, I have rather severe high frequency hearing loss and when I'm using a Verizon phone in a busy area it starts sounding like people are talking underwater.

Thoretically, with 4G LTE, Verizon can avoid that, but they have traditionally pushed voice calls off of the LTE network, to be handled by the old (and very widely deployed) CDMA systems. They've said that they're going to phase that out over the course of this year, so that may put an end to the issue.

 

Lol. Eric posted while I was still typing

 

Oh yeah, I only mentioned iPhones re the GSM SIM card capability because that's all I've bought for the past couple gens, I'm sure Verizon has other 'world' phones from Motorola/Samsung/etc that can also take a GSM SIM for overseas travel.

 

Very good info guys, I didn't realize the differences between GSM and CDMA. Just like the differences between DSL and cable internet.

Sprint does in fact already have HD voice, and it is actually very nice and clear...when it works. Both callers have to have spring, with a 4G phone, and in a coverage area that has HD voice coverage. Anyone know if that's how Verizon's HD Voice works?

 

I don't think the Verizon version is available yet, so grain of salt and all that, but my understanding is that yes it will require 4G, but both parties do not have to be on the same carrier - in this case it's better voice quality from your phone to the trunked network so it would be kind of like the improvement in call quality you get with a hardwired home phone instead of a wireless home phone, even though they both go over the same POTS trunked network from your home on out (although POTS doesn't mean much anymore, it's all digitized now anyway and lots of people are transported via VOIP from their home phone providers instead of a traditional connection)

 

Found this, Verizon actually just started rolling out HD Voice or Voice over LTE. Same requirements as Sprint, both much have an HD voice phone with Verizon and both in 4G coverage.

http://www.verizonwireless.com/news...g-soon-to-verizon-wireless4g-lte-network.html

 

Interesting, thanks, I'll have to read up on that! I must have misunderstood something : )

 

I have verizon and no complaints. Droid turbo should be out later this month. epic phone

 

Well my request finally got approved for work. For the preferred alternate provider, I had put Verizon and the Galaxy S5, thinking that they would confirm with me before placing the order...but nope. Final approval went through this morning and the phone should be here tomorrow or Saturday.

I think Verizon will be good though...heck, anything is better than Sprint! And I have been happy with my Galaxy S4...even the S3 was fine. The added battery life and water "proofing" of the S5 will be nice though.

 

Worked pretty well when Juks dropped his S5 into a tray of oil...

 

Oh no! Did it work after he cleaned it off?

 

Yeah, it's got all those seals in it to stop moisture.

 

What did he clean it with? Brake cleaner or carb cleaner would be my "go to" for a mess like that, but I can't imagine using those on a phone.

 

I'd be sending Samsung that pic for a testimonial lok

 

I think he just wiped it on his shirt.