Thanks for response guys

If you live in a metro area, most of them will work Ok. It's when you get outside the metro that you'll find that the two major carriers will have the best signal strength. We are with AT&T and have been for years, but it just depends on where you are as to which carrier will have the best signal.

Some years back, part of my job for a big global chemical company was to negotiate a cellphone contract for North America. After the mother of all spreadsheets, and factoring in the cost of roaming if one of our VP's was in Monaco or Mongolia, AT&T had the best average overall cost to the corporation. It turned out that the real economic deciding factor was the carryover of unused minutes (rollover) that AT&T offered. That would probably still be the factor that really mattered, unless Verizon offers something similar these days.

I have AT&T. But for west Texas I buy minutes for the OnStar phone (booster, I think it's a Verizon deal) in my truck and drive to a high spot. Only use it for checking in with the wife in that situation.

AT&T has gotten better at my place in Jack county over the last couple years but last year in Montana I would say half the state I had zero service and then the upper half of Michigan into Canada I had zero service but even then in michigan it was better than the year before so I would say AT&T is getting better but they may all be. I won't switch I have the good plan from years ago.

While hunting in Edwards and Val Verde counties, I used an ATT $2 a day phone. I had plans with Verizon and T-Mobile but no service out there.

Like others have said, depends on where you are at in the boonies. In the rural areas, they usually have roaming agreements with others, IE Panhandle Wireless, etc. If cost effective, I would get a cheap or prepaid plan for emergencies with the locals as they will have decent coverage in a pinch.

Did I mention that T Mobile sucks?

I've had T Mobile since they were something else. And mostly they are great. But away form populous areas or major travel routes they suck.

ATT worked great when hunting in west Texas. When I was hunting a lot in Colorado when I was younger, the dudes with Verizon always had way better reception than me. Up in Wyoming where I hunt outside of Cody, I swear you could be under a huge rock 100 miles from the middle of no where and still have perfect reception with ATT. Story has it that a bunch of ATT executives have houses and ranches in Wyoming so you can see the correlation there...

Nothing else comes close. Who wants to have coverage that is just good in East Texas or where ever....?

AT&T is better at our place in Colorado Cty. I have verizon and I have to walk up the hill to get any kind of reception and the guys with AT&T are sitting on the camp house porch looking at Facebook.

I often telecommute from my trailer at my deer lease in Houston County. My iPad has hotspot capability and the LTE capability from Verizon provides bandwidth to my laptop that's almost as fast as the wireline U-verse at home.

The cell coverage maps at the link below should help.

I should add that according to the Verizon coverage map, there is no service at my lease. However, it's about half way between two cell towers, which is enough to give me two bars of LTE performance.

Link

On our lease in pipe creek Sprint seems to work better than Verizon. I'm on verizon and my kids are on sprint. They can make calls from our trailer while my phone will have 0 service.

When I did those national contracts that I mentioned earlier, there were offices and locations in the US where AT&T just had bad or no service, so I had to do minor contracts with a couple of other carriers. Back then it was a toss up as to who had the best and biggest coverage area - between AT&T and Verizon. It's probably a pretty close matchup these days too. Just depends on where you are.

The company I work for has been putting WiFi in all DISD buildings for the last 3yrs now. Most of the WAP's (Wireless Attach Points) are running in the 2.4Ghz range which if most of you had a cordless phone it ran the same speed. Some worked really well and others didn't. Well starting back in February we have been adding 5Ghz because the 2.4 band is getting really crowded. This past week I was at one of the schools and was standing under a WAP along side the librarian and I had 5 bars and she had none. I have ATT and she had T-Mobile. I told her to get a different carrier.

Try consumer cellular - rated #1 cell phone company by consumer reports and they use AT&T lines. Any ATT phone will work with consumer cellular.

Go ATT. Works the best overall in TX and west US. Not so great in the south east US. But good from Aransas Pass to Dalhart. Both my wife's ranches have ATT towers.

AT&T works great at my lease in Deep South texas in the middle of nowhere. However at my house in the middle of a town of 50,000 people I have to have a cell booster for it to work - go figure

Again, the coverage maps available from the website that I shared earlier should be helpful in determining which carriers have towers in your area. You'll need to click the Reset button on the map for it to begin showing tower locations. Select the All Networks option and the map updates as you scroll across the map area.

The signal strength maps can be misleading and make it appear that coverage is often limited to small areas along major roads and highways. As I noted earlier, I can get two or three bars of Verizon LTE signal at my lease in Houston County, even though the nearest Verizon cell tower is roughly six miles away. Still, the map clearly explains why I must be near a tower-facing window to get that signal while working in my trailer.

I should have mentioned earlier that if you are somewhere out of your usual area and can't get a signal, turn your phone off, wait a bit, and turn it back on. Your phone should be automatically be checking for towers, but sometimes it won't. A shut down and restart will cause it to do a tower search. That's a tip I got from my AT&T rep, and every now and then it'll get me a signal where I wasn't getting one. Works for my iPad too.

And...T-Mobile and Sprint are good in metro areas, but they just don't have the coverage everywhere like the two big dogs do. The carriers do share some towers and pay for use of others' towers, or at least they did.

Couple of years ago, before I retired, the wife and I are cruising along on a driving vacation and were on the outskirts of Houston. She mentioned that she got a new cell phone to replace 'that one she didn't like' (which was an AT&T phone). She had been in Costco and saw a pretty one that she liked, and the Costco sales guy promised her that the carrier (T-Mobile) had great coverage everywhere. I said "surely you remember that national contract I did with AT&T, and that we both get to benefit from the nice low price, and that the coverage is excellent". She said that it was HER phone and she could buy whatever she wanted, and she chose this T-Mobile phone. So by now we were maybe 25 miles out of Houston on some secondary road. I looked at my phone, and I had a good signal. I said to her that it would be good to call one of our daughters and see how things are going. She grabbed her new phone. Punched in some numbers. Got nothing. No signal. No surprise (to me). Been back on AT&T since then.

So you guys get whatever phone you want, but I really suggest AT&T or Verizon for best overall coverage in the US and overseas. Just be advised that roaming charges in some third world countries, and in some parts of the former Soviet Union can be very expensive.

All that said, I hate AT&T customer service, or lack thereof. When I retired, I was allowed to keep my corporate phone and phone number. All I had to do was take over the monthly charges and to call AT&T customer service to switch ultimate payment responsibility from my former company to me personally. How tough could that be, so I filled out the paperwork and then called their customer service. Things went pretty well until they said they had to ask me three questions to verify that I was who I said I was. Ok, I said, fire away. They asked me how many kids I had, what was my home mortgage payment, and what was the monthly payment on my Kubota tractor. I gave them the answers. They said I was wrong. WHAT? I said that it can't be wrong, and they said I missed one question. Well heck, which question was it? We can't tell you that. I said ask them again, that maybe I had misunderstood one question or they had misunderstood one of my answers. Ok, they re asked. I answered. They said I was wrong. Back and forth we went. They said that perhaps I should talk to the corporate representative. I said that the corporate rep from our side, at least for a few more days was ME, and that I did the da__ contract. And that I really was me. Took a long time to get all that straight and to convince them I was me. A nightmare.

And last, let me tell that AT&T and probably many other major corporations know more about you and your life than you ever DREAMED. They had info about me that they had no reason to have. They knew all of my previous home mortgages. Car and tractor payments, my income at the previous few companies. They knew everything about me, to the degree that it was scary. And this info was open to anyone that had clearance to log in at the company. That really bothered me, but there's nothing you or me can do about it. That's just the way it is these days.

X2

No phone reception=how I prefer it. I know it's good for emergencies but when I'm at the lease I'll leave it in my bag or glove box turned off.

My brother has AT&T and any time we are in the boonies of Oklahoma or even in the mountains of Colorado, that punk has service!!

Sprint has been good about getting voice coverage, but el oh el at data coverage.