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Comment by adamgray | Hacker News Reader

I'm normally happy with T-Mobile in the cities, but after a cross-country road trip I'm pretty disappointed with their service in the Great Plains and PNW. My traveling companion consistently had service with LTE with AT&T while I was on edge or 3G. On the East Coast and Midwest my T-Mobile service is stellar. I probably won't switch anything because 99% of my time I'm in the Chicago city limits, but it was a bit disappointing to have to drive without streaming services or podcasts.

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I drove from Indiana to Seattle two years ago while on Tmobile. I really only had issues in the mountains, in National Parks (yellowstone really, the badlands were fine for the most part, and had full LTE at Mt. Rushmore), and chunks of South Dakota.

Out of curiosity, does your phone support Band 12? Because they have been really pushing that rollout which roughly triples their range and building penetration, so I wonder if that could account for our different experiences.

Not sure, it's an iPhone 6s. Sure a lot of the places were a little bit out there (Eastern Washington, Badlands, Southern Utah, Yellowstone) but my friend was nearly at full service the entire time (aside from mountains). We ended up just installing Spotify on her iPad and logging in with my account :)

I use podcast addict to pile up my podcasts. I have maybe 100 hours sitting ready to listen to locally.

I hit the tmobile glitch up in Wisconsin.. but as long as I plan ahead it is ok. I have the areas downloaded locally to google maps etc.

Not perfect, but not terrible either.

Yeah, I never have been big on podcasts but ever since they added it to Spotify I've actually discovered a bunch of great stuff. Makes those long drives when you can't agree on music easier.

Yeah, as an avid camper, backpacker, climber, or general outdoor person knows, you need at least one person with Verizon in your party. Tmobile is not great at all outside of cities.

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