I decided to go with PacBell PCS because of their excellent free feature set:
Caller ID
Call Waiting
Voicemail
Paging
Call Forwarding
Three-way calling
Text Messaging

The 1000 free night and weekend minutes were not a bad incentive either. My main problem with it is that you have no idea where coverage will be. Though my city (Palo Alto) is listed as a full coverage area, I can not get a signal in my house! I have to walk 20 feet away in order to make a telephone call! I find this happens a lot when I enter buildings and such. When I am within a coverage area the calls sound great, and I rarely get a dropped call. The features worked as expected and I love the free text messaging, which allows you to send short messages to other PacBell PCS users or to an internet email address directly from your phone. It's great for those messages that aren't important enough to justify a call, but yet you want them to get the message anyway.

CA/Nevada roaming is great, since my home is in the bay area and I attend college in southern california, I don't have to worry about paying for roaming charges are changing my number when I am down there.

Regarding the tech support, I've had a varied experience with them. Sometimes they are very helpful, othertimes they don't know what they're doing. In order to sign up for the free text messaging promotion I had to call three times in order to get to an operator that knew what I was talking about. Also, I had a hell of a time troubleshooting an international roaming problem. PacBell's answer: "The tower's are down" My boss was in Hong Kong and couldn't use his cell phone and there was nothing that PacBell could do at all! The towers stayed down for about three days. This is unacceptable in the global marketplace! If PacBell had been more descriptive of their problems or had offered a workaround I would not be so upset at them but the fact is they dropped the ball, and we were left out to dry.


Recommended: Yes