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by raw_anon_1111 245 days ago
All carriers are scammy in their own way
2 comments

MVNOs FTW. They know they're competing for price-conscious consumers so have to offer more value. The big 3 know most of their customers are going to go with one of the big boys, all of whom are expensive and not great.
MVNOs have slower data rates since they buy deprioritized traffic in bulk, don’t have the roaming agreements domestically and especially not internationally, and don’t offer unlimited high speed data.
Hm, not my experience. When traveling internationally there was an option I could have used, but I chose to use a local SIM card instead. The data speeds are just fine for me, and I haven't experienced any issues with roaming domestically.

But then I don't even care about 5g versus 4g/LTE for the most part, so perhaps I'm just not noticing limits that affect others.

That’s how MVNOs work, they buy data in bulk at wholesale prices. But they pay for lower QoS. There isn’t anything wrong with that. But they are getting jankier bandwidth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QoS_Class_Identifier

T-Mobile comes with 5GB of high speed data per month to use for roaming in Canada and Mexico and lower speed data roaming almost anywhere else in the world.

So, maybe don't do business with the worst of them? Of the big 3 in the US, T-Mobile is the one I'd avoid right now.
Verizon is overpriced and is the Comcast equivalent of cellular carriers. AT&T is about as bad
Verizon owns most of the value brands in the US and you made no connection between them and Comcast beyond mentioning them in the same sentence.

AT&T is "about as bad" as what? You gave no information.

Price, customer service
Based on the type of responses you are giving, I actually do believe you probably call your phone company's customer service regularly. So perhaps your criteria might be different. Have you heard of Consumer Cellular?
Consumer cellular rate plans are the same price as T-Mobile and they don’t have international roaming included.