Because of a change in work hours, my wife and my only contact with each other 5 days out of the week is via phone. And because my work phones are recorded and we have no landline, we had to rely on our cell phones to talk to each other. Our previous carrier, Sprint, was lagging behind in the new wave of mobile-to-mobile free minutes. Sprint gave no indication of starting up that service so at the beginning of 2003 we switched to T-Mobile. They had a great family plan and we each got the Motorola T720i phones.

At first everything was great, but it seemed as the weather got warmer, the reception got worse. By Spring we found ourselves walking around our apartment trying to find a spot with good reception. We both had similar problems with our jobs. (We lived downtown and both work downtown.) We soon moved to a suburb where the reception was good. But by late Spring reception was horrible at our house. All summer we had to deal with this and all we could get from T-Mobile for an explanation is that in buildings the reception might not be that great. It is now mid-fall and with the weather dropping, reception seems a little better. I can have short conversations at work (as opposed to none during the summer). One final con is that when calling my wife's number and it gets to voicemail, you do not hear her message but a very loud high-pitched noise instead. This was intermittent before, but now it is every time. We do not have a cause yet because we're bringing up this weekend when we go.

We are going to T-Mobile this weekend to see if we can get different phones. Whether we can or not, we will be switching back to Sprint in January who now has free mobile-to-mobile minutes.

UPDATE: 11-18-2003

With one last chance for T-Mobile to redeem themselves, my wife and I went to the T-Mobile store where we purchased our phones. We were hoping they'd offer to let us try new phones or something. But instead, the representative told us nothing could be done and we'd be better off sticking it out until our contract was up and going to another company. What a way to sell their company. They've obviously had the same complaint many times. And those stores are good only for new customers. We couldn't even change our plan with those people.

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 80/mo