The rural mobile coverage in Aotearoa New Zealand is terrible. I'm excited about this. This probably will get me to switch from Spark because at the moment they have the best rural coverage.
It's slow and expensive. In comparison, I moved from Uruguay where you could get 5G almost everywhere, and in VERY rural areas it drops to 4G. Per GB of pre-paid data, NZ is 20,000% more expensive than Uruguay, in a straight-up apples to apples comparison.
Most of rural NZ has zero coverage. And i'm not talking very rural, you can still be IN WELLINGTON CITY and still have no coverage. I lose coverage sometimes biking along the waterfront. If you go 30 minutes outside of the city centre, there's basically no coverage. Along major highways, like driving from Wellington to Auckland, MOST of the route has zero coverage.
This is a comical exaggeration of the coverage in NZ. Almost the entire drive from Welly to Auckland is covered, with a large proportion in 4g. Anyone can trivially look up a coverage map to confirm this, and I'm telling you as a Kiwi that the above comment is almost entirely fictional. I don't know of anywhere in Wellington city without coverage, maybe some random blackspot between buildings?
Cell phone planes in NZ are typically much less expensive than the US, you can get a decent plan for NZD 20/month, where in the US I couldn't find much for less than USD 30/month, which is over twice as much. I hear that in other countries it can be a lot cheaper.
Contrary to the parent I've found coverage to be fine, and haven't noticed losing coverage in places that I'd expect it.