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Comment by benjamincburns | Hacker News Reader

> In the city (Chicago) the service can't be better.

Emphasis mine.

My wife and I got the $30 100 minute/"unlimited" data plan as a stop-gap before leaving the country to move abroad. Before leaving we drove from SC, to MA, to CT, to NY, on over to WI. Unless we were near a major city, our devices were roaming on to AT&T, where we only had 10MB of data to use. The voice coverage was fine while roaming, but since we were using one of the phones as a GPS to navigate, it got annoying at times.

Now this is a cut-rate plan that's full of limitations, and we knew that, but still the service we received was much worse than we expected. I'd strongly advise anyone considering T-mobile to check the roaming agreement.

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Conversely, I spent two weeks driving an RV from Chicago to Burning Man (where I had coverage on the playa), and then back to Chicago through Yellowstone. Yes, I had a roaming data cap, but it was higher than yours since I'm on the unlimited $50 voice/text/data plan (I believe I get 100MB/month of roaming data).

I can't really complain when my wife was sending MMS pics back home of Burning Man from inside our RV. That's coverage.

My brother did 1.2 GB of tethering in a couple hours on my T-Mobile phone while I was driving down I-75 from Detroit to the middle of Ohio. No coverage problems, no overage fees (I'm on the unlimited data plan), and we had a movie to watch by the time we got to the hotel.

Yeah, but keep going down I75 and coverage gets spotty, you start roaming on AT&T, and then is mediocre T-Mobile until you hit southern Tennessee/Northern Georgia. Luckily though I was getting good 3G around Georgia though.

I'm driving from Chicago to Tampa, FL this weekend. I'll have to use the OpenSignal app to see how the T-Mobile coverage is.

> our devices were roaming on to AT&T, where we only had 10MB of data to use.

Is this really that much of a problem? Coming from an Aussie who is used to having no mobile access at all (not even emergency) driving between major cities.

I also assume when traveling I have no data, and download a map to my phone before leaving for GPS. When driving around LA however, for example, I'll use Google Maps which is a total data hog and works great on T-Mobile most anywhere. Google Nexus + T-Mobile: one of the best combos out there when in a US city.

Which roads were you driving? We drove all the way through outback QLD->NT->SA, and it was pretty reasonable coverage on the highways. That's with Telstra though, the other telcos suck.

It's funny. We're a nation of few people, spread across a very large piece of land. You would think that coverage would be a critical issue for telecoms, but it's not.

As a fellow Aussie, lack of coverage is why I moved (back) to Telstra; outside of the major cities, only Telstra has reasonable coverage. Whenever I visit my parents in Gympie (~2 hours north of Brisbane, ~20,000 people), my previous carrier (Vodafone) couldn't connect me in the town's main street. Optus could only do so at a certain corner. With Telstra, I receive ~2mbps in the middle of my parents' farm. The difference in coverage between Telstra and its competitors is extreme.

Yet, Optus and Vodafone are two major carriers with millions of customers. Optus and Vodafone are not much cheaper than Telstra. But this small price difference (I'd actually be paying more for my equivalent plan with Vodafone..) is apparently (according to those millions of Optus and Vodafone customers) worth sacrificing a huge amount of coverage for.

tl;dr - Aussies don't seem to care that much about coverage, just price.

Because most people never leave the cities (or do so very rarely). They do, however, have to pay the extra per month. Telstra's extra coverage just isn't worth $120 a year (to some/most).

No, for us it wasn't that much of a problem at all - but we'd made similar trips using Verizon as our carrier, so we were expecting a similar area of coverage. Since this wasn't really advertised to us up front, it gave us the perception that the service was sub-par in comparison to other offerings.

That said, if I needed a month of stop-gap coverage on the cheap, I'd definitely use the service again.

Edit: Oh, and we've just moved to Christchurch. I think it's a similar story here w/ coverage between cities, but obviously the distances involved are much, much smaller.

How does the 10MB work. I have T-Mobile and didn't hear about the 10MB roaming limit. Is it in the fine print?

http://t-mo.co/DataRoam

It depends on your current data plan. I was capped at 50MB and they sent me an SMS when I hit 40 alerting me to possible overuse. I just turned off data roaming in the Android settings and everything was fine.

Their new Simple Choice plan has unlimited roaming

That is what I was wondering. I just switched to T-Mobile and was worried I missed something in the fine print.

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