Wireless

UPDATE: I wrote this over a week ago, but just now realized that Blogger's "schedule a post later" never actually posted.

I knew it had been a long time since I'd written here, but I didn't realize it had been almost half a year. Whoops. Part of the reason for that is that I haven't been playing a ton of games since I canceled GameFly. Don't get me wrong, I've still been playing things occasionally. But I haven't really been diving into a game like I did when I felt like I was "on the clock" with a rented game. Time is money in that situation and now that I've been buying games outright, I tend to take my time. 

Another reason is that to blog, I have to be at home and have my laptop on. I hardly ever bother to switch on my (aging) laptop since I have a phone and tablet that are instant-on and much easier to walk around the house with. Related to this, keeping up with news on phones & tablets is kind of a hobby for me. Sort of taking the place of keeping up with news on videogames if you're going by what's in my Google Reader compared to a year or two ago. With this in mind I thought I'd write a bit about what I've been doing with that lately since it's way too much text for twitter. Feel free to skip this post if you don't care. I'll get back to videogames eventually. Probably.

Still reading? Ok, well I've been on T-Mobile for over a decade. It's been fairly decent for the most part, but in the last few years when everyone switched to data-centric smartphones they've been falling behind. Not being able to sell a phone with an "i" at the start of it is not something that I really care about, but it's sort of embarassing for the company and a big deal to lots of customers that are leaving in droves. Also, the TMO data network itself is falling behind everyone else's. LTE is still a year away and if you get far from a major city or highway, you're on dialup modem speeds. That basically means text-only internet and don't even bother trying to upload anything.

I've been frustrated with this and approaching the end of my contract with them so I wanted to check out some other options. Since I have an unlocked Galaxy Nexus that works just fine on both AT&T and TMO, I thought I'd try AT&T. But AT&T is really expensive. So when I heard about Straight Talk wireless (that just uses AT&T's network but for much lower prices) I jumped at it. You also have the option to use TMO's network, but that wouldn't really do me any good. I ordered a SIM card and put it in my Nexus about a week ago. So how is it so far? 

It’s been better than T-mobile at my house only. At my brother’s house, just south of KC, I was expecting to get 3G on AT&T where TMO only has 2G (based on looking at AT&T data coverage maps) but I only ever saw 2G. Speed tests on AT&T have been pretty dismal and it stutters even trying to load Instagram.  Not too impressive. 

Another situation where TMO has been suffering in the last year is at places that are really crowded like stadiums or parades. A few weeks back I went to a Chiefs game at Arrowhead stadium and I couldn't do a thing with my TMO phone while a friend was having no problems with his Verizon LTE. So when I tried the Straight Talk AT&T SIM with the same phone I expected improvement. But I never did get any data once I got inside the stadium w/ AT&T. It was even having trouble getting a voice signal. I swapped SIMs back to TMO in my seat after about 10 min. of being frustrated (and Verizon LTE once again working flawlessly). Surprisingly, the TMO wasn't bad this time. It probably had something to do with their recent improved network coverage in KC.

I’ll be curious to test it out down at my mom’s house in the Ozarks, but so far I’m not impressed. I may be sticking with TMO after all. You may be wondering why I don't just switch to Verizon if it's been so impressive. Well I may eventually end up doing just that. But for now, I'm enjoying my unlocked phone, cheap TMO plan, and no-contract freedom. So that's my little wireless experiment. Hopefully it can help somebody else.