tigersoul

I have to make calls in the daytime and only have 500 minutes, also some members of the family are paranoid that cell phones cause cancer and only use them when they have to, not to mention sprint's building penetration is not very good unless I'm near a window and even then it's only 1-2 bars in the best conditions (i.e. stationary, no storms) I'm hoping this improves when LTE/NV goes live in Jan. Nah, I'm not paying anywhere near $500, just pointing out that even people who are paying a premium cost are getting poor service. Thanks for the info, I was actually considering going to AT&T data-only plan recently when my sprint data bottomed out at 200-300kbps (it's gone back up to ~700kbps now, which is useable) now I know that really is an option if I have to take that rout at some point Yeah, I'm not sure what the distance is, I was told I'm <500' from the road but the ISP says I'm not so *shrug* I have the same problem with Cable, they said I'm too far out to get service

I use two different VOIP providers, one is $3 or $4/month (Skype) and one is free but only works conveniently on my cellphone (Google Voice + Talkatone --- actually though I pay the optional $20/year for Talkatone premium to remove the ads and get a "slightly better audio codec" and "higher compression") too much invested in this area to move right now, but I will be switching ISPs hopefully next year when they build out more. They suffice (barely) since most of the lowups/outages are at night --- but I know people who are paying far more and have far worse service from them (a friend of mine has a shop in the center of town and is paying like $500/month and has to reset his modem about 10 times a day --- and that's not counting the times the service is flat-out down) There's huge suspicion that the local ISP is about to sell out to Comcast so they dont really care about QoS anymore. Thankfully there's competition slowly creeping in now so hopefully things will improve. Make no mistake though, I am not against moving and in fact plan to within the next couple years (hate it here TBH), it's just not an option right now.

Very enlightening. a bit confusing (it seemed to me that it was talking about how much data a tower could send to 1 user in 1 month) but very enlightening. If that's correct and each tower can only provide ~1tb/month of data to everyone on the network, then I can understand more why there are so many limits now (I used to argue that "we had with unlimited data from nearly all the carriers (in the GPRS days) the carriers have just gotten greedy now!" though I still say to impose a cap and call it unlimited is false advertising (the cap doesnt bother me, the fact they pretend it's not there does) I might (never clocked it) for 3 simple reasons: 1. I do 3D modeling and back up all my models on a remote server, sometimes a single file is a gb if there are a lot of objects in it. 2. I use VOIP for my daily calls to my family since my phone company still charges for long-distance, and 3. I stream a lot of HD video. If I cut the video and the backups I might get down lower, but daily calls totally around an hour to two hours every day eat a lot of data.

just for those wondering, the current imaginary line for 3G is 100gb. Use more than that in 1 month and your terminated no questions asked. As for LTE *shrug* (really annoys me when they claim its "unlimited" then have a limit, however high... they should just market it as 100gb/month data)

I subscribe to the belief that I shouldn't be charged twice for the same data and should be allowed to use it as I please (and many cellular providers are now allowing tethering without a tethering plan) If it is against forum rules I will not mention it again, however from my personal perspective it's an unethical ripoff to make me pay for data and then make me pay for it a second time just because I want to use it on another device (especially so when the device is essentially identical except it has a larger screen like my iPad). I have legitimate, 100% legal, reasons that I need 24/7 connectivity. Despite how it might sound, I actually don't tether much and will be doing it even less when I can finally change ISPs. I used AT&T for a while and never went over my 3gb/month plan. As nice as the idea of using it as my primary ISP sounds (especially with speeds of 20mbps+) the latency kills it for me, I routinely pull 500-1100ms pings with averages of 350ms, those don't cut it (WoW addict, *awkward laugh*) I'm sure that would also be a problem for torrenting (which I remind everyone is legal in and of itself - some companies even use it for updates to decrease the loads on their servers such as Blizzard ) I'd think that you'd not be able to connect to anyone in the swarm with those pings) it always takes 24 hours for my phone to start accepting data so I don't want to swap back-and-forth, not to mention every time I do it I have to re-setup my Google Voice service. And for those wondering, I prefer to keep my iPhone if possible because I prefer the stability of iOS and certain things work FAR better for me on it than on android. @ lordsutch: Thank you for actually answering my question! I was not aware that cleremont had LTE already, the only reason I knew gainesville had it was when I was ordering my phone they mentioned it. I rarely head that direction. @ S4gru: Thanks for the info! the ISP situation is actually laughable, I was told by one that if I was any closer to the road I could get service, but at my location they couldn't offer it to me right now (though it may be available sometime next year when they build out more) As I said above, I don't tether much, as tempting as it might be with LTE, I wont be using it as my primary ISP. EDIT: also in case it wasn't clear above, I do not condone piracy nor do I have any need to do it. Netflix for movies/tv, and sites like freemyapps that give me itunes credit for free cover my bases nicely.

(Note: I was sent here by a member on HoFo, so this is a direct copy/paste of my post on there) LTE is available ~30 miles away, my local towers' data speeds dropped significantly and when I called up sprint they told me that the towers were slow because they were being upgraded to LTE and it should go live in Jan. I currently have an iPhone5, but there is no jailbreak and a LOT of people are scratching their heads and saying there may never be a jailbreak. I *need* tethering (my home DSL goes from 3mbps to 0.7-1.0mbps every few nights and usually once a week (sometimes more) it completely goes down for upto 4 hours) so I'm looking at heading back to android so I can tether. My question is this: Should I spend the money (which is tight right now) to get an LTE android phone, with the promise of LTE by January, or should I just reactivate my old EVO 4G (WiMax, not LTE 4g) because sprint is likely just lieing about LTE the same way it was about WiMax (which I was supposed to have "next quarter" of my entire last 2-year contract) ​(Note x2: I'm in Cleveland, GA, 30528. LTE is live (I'm told) in Gainesville, GA)