Your mentioning a few good points. Consider how you will use your phone. Primarilly Local? or national? etc. I used to use my phone locally only for emergencies etc. While out driving. Because it was a good deal and had a lot of good services like caller ID and Voicemail etc. I went with Primco. Looking at their coverage map, they seemed to cover the city of Chicago well and around the tollways and expressways.... I would occasionally go to Wisconsin and saw that along 94 and some of the other highways they had good coverage. Their coverage though was clearly centered along the interstates. Probably their strategy to build where people were driving. Places where I would frequently go, Kenosha, up to Delefield (West of Milwaukee)and out to Madison were covered. Highway 50 from Kenosha, west to Lake Geneva, was being built out and would be servicable soon... So, I thought it was a good deal for the price. However, as I got to more rural areas, inside, say the triangle from Kenosha to Milwaukee to Madison, like Elkhorn, Whitewater, Burlington.... I hit dead zones where there was no coverage at all. I took a trip to FLA and saw that Marco Island (Naples/Ft.Myers) was covered and thought it was great when I got the phone. Got the phone right before going down there. Called from the beach up to our apartment and it was a free local call. Then, the next trip down, a year later, I think, I learned that, completely unannounced to the customers, Primco had sold to new company, US Cellular. US Cellular didn't operate in the Lee and Collier County area of SW FLA. I noticed that my phone was on Roaming and that I was also incurring long distance charges which I didn't get before. Just calling from the entry to our condo, to the manager to let us in because they had changed the locks on the building while we were gone, I found that I was paying roaming and long distance. The total bill for that month went from $19.95 to $160.00. Calls that I would make from the beach up to our apartment, were now roaming and long distance for a call of about 200 yards.

I called US Cellular but couldn't get through as the merger had taken place, I guess, a few days earlier and there were issues with that and getting things switched over. I left email on their website and never got a reply. With all that, I immediately cancelled my account and went back to Cellular One (Cingular). I will point out that the US Cellular issue was 3 years ago. I have friends who use them today and they say they are happy?????

Now, as I said, I am with Verizon. Still have issues at my home. I am in an area where I loose connections a lot. I don't get signals in the back of the house or in the basement. Elsewhere around the house or yard can be iffy. But then, I had the same problem with Primco and Cingular, My brother had it with ATT.... So, it is probably just part of the geography here. But, look at what friends and family use. See how their coverage in your area is. If you travel a lot think of the avaiability of national plans. I think Verizon is strong in that regard. One of the stronger that I know of. Whether FLA, Vegas, Wisconsin, or anywhere I have been, asside from small dead zones like inside a building or in a specific neighborhood where a tower might not be in clear sight, I have never had a problem with Verizon.

When changing from US Cellular to Cingular to Verizon, my needs for a phone had changed some. While I still needed it, primarilly, for local use in times of need or to be reached by family, I now had a girlfriend that I wanted to keep in better touch with. Stuff like the more dependable Voice Mail arrangement seemed to be more useful than what Cingular had to offer. Also, with some travel in mind like to Las Vegas or calling my girlfriend when she went to Seattle to visit her mom, National Coverage became more important than it was previously. All the services that I compared in that area,(Las Vegas), specifically, Verizon came to the surface as one of the better. Add to that more trips to Wisconsin and those previously mentioned rural dead zones, and Verizon's coverage seemed far better than the US Cellular's coverage and more affordable than Cingular.