The Sphinx family has used Consumer Cellular for years without complaint.

Last time I checked, Consumer Cellular does not finance cell phones. We buy our phones second-hand and use them until they no longer work.

I think we have saved a *huge* amount of money doing things this way. In addition to the lower rates of Consumer Cellular, you're not building in the cost of replacing your phone every couple of years and buying the latest and greatest.

I have a used Galaxy S8, which was released in March 2017. It works fine, and I will upgrade when I lose it or it gets dunked in the toilet.

The “CDMA” vs “GSM” question was at one point a very big deal but it is largely moot these days. The cellular industry unified around 4G/LTE and by now 4G/LTE coverage is pretty ubiquitous. So the typical consumer would not need to worry about CDMA vs. GSM these days. (Historically, Verizon & Sprint were on the CDMA bandwagon but AT&T & T-Mobile were on the GSM bandwagon.)

We use Cricket, which operates on the AT&T backbone. It might be owned by AT&T; it's a prepaid thing.

$125 per month, for five unlimited lines. That works out to not such a bad deal. And the service is decent here in the boonies, and in all places I ever (used to) travel. The only place I've ever run out of service is driving westward ... the stretch from here to Oregon has places where the service is nonexistent. And it's pretty awful at Yosemite, but I've heard that it's awful for everyone at Yosemite. The only time that was ever an issue was when my daughter fell and hurt herself, but we were able to get help fairly quickly.

We use Google Fi. The two of us together is 45 a month plus $10 a GB. We are usually between $55 and $75 a month (including taxes (we don’t use a lot of data). You only use the data if you are someplace without WiFi.

I’ve had T-Mobile for about 15 years now. I had a couple of minor service problems but they were resolved quickly.

You’re just going to have to slog through all the carriers web sites other than AT&T and find the one that offers the best plans, coverage, and phones that suit you. It’ll be time consuming but what can you do.

I originally started with Cellular One and then it became Cingular. Then AT&T took over Cingular. At about that time, one of my coworkers told me about Voice Stream. She said she got great service from them. So when Cingular got taken over by AT&T that’s when I decided to switch over to Voice Stream which became T-Mobile. It’s a German company.

Sprint had some phones with a short distance radio feature. This walkie-talkie mode allows you to talk to someone close by without having to go through the carrier’s network. Sprint inherited this walkie talkie feature when they acquired Nextel. So if your phone has this feature, it may not work with T-Mobile and definitely not with other carriers. I don’t think smart phones have this feature at all, just Sprint's non-smart phones.

I’m on google fi as well. It’s ok, but cause I’m on iOS is basically means I fly on the T-Mobile network. It can be hard to get a good connection in my basement with them.

I’m thinking I may switch to visible. It’s an mvno that runs on Verizon backbone. $40 per month, unlimited everything. And if you have two lines, $35 each, 3 lines $30 each, and 4+ lines $25 each.