Moved to T-Mobile

I have been on Straight Talk $45 plan for two months after I got a Nexus 5. It has been very fine (I’m in Manhattan, New York most of the time) but I used the line in a very limited amount of time.

I also see that I will be accompanied by someone daily real soon, which means she will also need a phone line. Then I remembered the post by Tatsuhiko about how T-Mobile was awesome. We will also occasionally go abroad (Japan mostly), and I have already had issues that I haven’t had a cell phone line while I was in Tokyo several times by now. If T-Mobile family plan with unlimited international roaming (data and text) works for him, it should work well for us too.

The concern though is that T-Mobile doesn’t have too good reputation regarding coverage and quality of bandwidth. 

Call drops, LTE unstable, narrower coverage, weaker signals, etc. Well, since I am on a sim-free phone, I can test drive it for a month with a prepaid plan and see how/if it works, can’t I?

It turned out that Walmart has this value offer that you can get unlimited text and data (first 5GB on LTE) and 100 minutes of talk. I don’t need many talk minutes (hey, I received exactly 2 calls from someone, and called absolutely nobody in these few months over cell phone), I probably need some data. Straight Talk was 2.5GB on LTE in 30 days cycle. That’s doubled on this T-Mobile/Walmart plan.

So, here I am; I just activated my Nexus 5 on the T-mo line. Let’s see how the carrier is “the fastest nationwide 4G LTE network” as it is advertising as of Feb. 2014.