Cell Phone Carriers – Carrying our Cell Phone Cares

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A cell phone glossary can help for understanding more about cellular phones themselves and the jargon, and we can do a cell phone comparison to consider their features and so forth, but what about the cell phone carriers that we rely on to get out signal out to where its wanted?

The manufacturers make the phones, and there are certainly plenty of them around like Sony Ericsson, Nokia, and Oki, Philips, Samsung and Sanyo, Siemens, Panasonic, Motorola, Kyocera, LG, Bosch, NEC, Handspring and Palm, Audiovox, Qualcomm, Denso, Hyundai, JRC, and Mitsubishi, Neopoint, Novatel and others but the choice of cell phone companies can often be a more fraught one.

How complete is that coverage?

The problem with this is that it can vary so much, and hence the dreaded 'R' for roaming haunts some of our dreams nightly. It can vary from area to area and so the only real way you can tell for sure is to ask someone who regularly goes where you go what cellular phone providers they would recommend from their experience.

But this is easier said than done, after all not everyone might be willing to talk about it (especially if they develop a twitch as soon as you mention cell phone carriers) so tread carefully or you might get landed with an hour lecture on the ways and means of the cell phone companies behavior.

Mind you, at least this would warn you in advance who are less than perfect where you live.

Service, service

They all do their best of course, really they do, but we do pay for using our phones so we expect to be able too, without failure, ever.

Now no industry can ever have a 100% success rate, but for some reason we seem to be less forgiving when it comes to cell phone carriers than we are in other fields.

The coverage in the United States does tend to go downhill when you leave the cities, so some folks just buy satellite phones and be done with it, but packages that include a free cell phone are so tempting that we want to try them out. And the cellular phone carriers seem to have so many cell phone plans that they must work okay most of the time.

What did you say, I can’t hear you

The trouble is that they can bring some of this wrath down on themselves by irritating us by not giving us enough anytime minutes (how many are enough - there can never be enough) in their cell plans.

So we grind our teeth when 'dropped calls' occur; that is, calls that are started but lost before they are finished - I’ve started, so I'll finish - seems reasonable enough. But it may not be possible when coverage is patchy.

Or when sentences start to sound like some kind of word game with missing syllables throughout (mind you this can be a convenient excuse for not hearing what we don’t want too at times).

It’s also a bit disconcerting that the peak hours can vary from plan and carrier, so when to expect a call from others who are with different providers can not always be perfectly predicted.

Then we come to the roaming matter - aha say the companies - if you don’t want to be out of touch, then you have to deal with roaming.

Very convenient, say we.

Though to be fair some are now reacting by offering free roaming plans.

Are they each others friends or foes?

This is not that easy to answer, sometimes they help each other and share or lease out capacity or resources to one another, and at other times they appear to be intent on slitting each others throats by ways of marketing.

Again, a quality cell phone review is a lot easier than trying to get the lowdown on the cellular phone carriers at times, but all your pals have got multimedia phones and you want one too, or you are just aching to try out all the gizmos on pocket PC phones so you have to take the plunge.

Some people are never satisfied, so don’t rely on just one opinion; ask around a bit, cellular phones are important in the modern world, but you still should get the best deal you can, whether it's a "free" cell phone offer or not.