Cingular Wireless has the most competitive plan around.
Especially the free unlimited nights and weekends option.
Other service providers like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint offer something similar but with a minute-limit (like $20 for 2000 off peak minutes or something like that) while Cingular is *free*.

After comparing several providers, I decided to go with Cingular Wireless.

However, things went wrong on the first month of the bill. Basically Cingular Wireless has a flaw in their contract, and I'd like to share it so people will be careful on that.

I signed up with Cingular at an electronics store, there I met a Cingular agent, who signed me up with the plan. Since the Cingular contract (at least in SF Bay Area) does not have a box to check to indicate the free unlimited nights and weekends option. A new customer can never tell if an agent has signed up that option for you. In fact, I did explicitly remind the agent "make sure you signed me up on the nights and weekends option", and she said "yes".
Unfortunately, she did not do that. Hence I used up my monthly minutes on the 5th day of the first month. The charge on the first month was $600.

I called their customer service every day for 2 weeks, faxed the contract to them and explained the situation to them. Finally they agreed to credit less than half of the amount to me.

I stopped using the phone immediately when I found out the first month was wrong. However, it was already into the 10th day of the second month. Now the same thing happened.
I used up the minutes on the 4th day of the 2nd month. Since there was a previous agreed settlement on the first month, I called their customer service and spoke to another manager (who has authority to give credit) to ask for the same "courtesy credit" again. He refused. This is bad customer service.

The bottom line is, if you are with Cingular, you better wish there is nothing going wrong on your account and never need to deal with their customer service.
Based on my experience dealing with Cingular, they never consider on the customer side. If you want any credit from them? Prepare for a fight.

Apart from customer service. I figured out Cingular has bad reception as well. This is primarily due to their technology. Cingular uses GSM1900 wireless technology, which is a very high compared to Analog or TDMA (800Mhz).
High frequency is good or bad, good in a sense that the voice quality is good. However, high frequency signals cannot travel to long distances (like AM can travel longer, while FM cannot). To solve this problem, the provider need to install many stations everywhere to provide the same coverage. In many other countries or cities, there is normally not a big issue because people lives in more concentrated area (higher density) and the cost of deploying a station is hence low. However in US this is a different story - the land is big, and people lives in scattered area.
Hence it is very difficult for GSM providers like Cingular to provide good reception to everywhere.
In fact, they cannot even provide good reception even in popular local malls - I noticed that in a two-level mall here, the signals are significantly better on the 2nd level while it is weaker on the 1st level. I cannot even receive a signal when I entered stores on the 1st level.

So what service I am using now?
Luckily I did not discontinue the AT&T unlimited nights and weekends plan (no peak minutes) I signed up 5 years ago. Although it is more expensive, the reception and customer service is much much much better than Cingular.

Even if you do not care about customer service, I still not recommending GSM providers. In my opinion, GSM technology is not suitable to deploy here in US.


Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 39.99