Comparisons Between Cingular, Nextel and Verizon

Since I have had three difference cell phone providers in less than two years, I am the perfect candidate to review cell phone service. I have recently had experiences with Nextel/Sprint, Cingular, and Verizon. Out of these three, I have had one horrible experience, one decent experience and a great experience.

My fiancé and I signed up with Cingular in April 2005. We were able to share minutes, which was nice. I'm sure you've seen the commercials where Cingular claims to have the least drop calls of any of the providers. I found this to be untrue. I had many dropped calls and they were all in different areas. I drove 40 minutes to college each day and had at least one dropped call per drive. However, I dealt with it, even though I was annoyed. We moved to an apartment complex in April 2006 and we had no service in our apartment at all. One night, my fiancé dropped eight calls in a matter of minutes. We had to go outside to even get a little bit of service. We called Cingular numerous times. For the most part, they were helpful. They tried sending new signals and updates to our phones, but nothing worked. Since we didn't have a land line, I decided that we needed to get a new phone service. Unfortunately, we were under contract for two years.

Despite our contract, I decided to call Cingular and see if there was a way for us to get out of our contract since we had so many problems. I talked to a man, who wasn't very helpful. He told me that there was nothing that he could do. I asked for his supervisor. It took an hour for him to get the supervisor on the line. At this point, I was very annoyed. The supervisor was very rude to me and told me that he would not let me break my contract. He saw that I only used 200 minutes of my account within the last few months. He said that he could get me out of that contract, but not the other phone. After much fighting, we settled to get out of one contract for free and to pay $150 to get out of the second contract. Right after we got off the phone, our service was cut off. We were left with no phones.

Since we need phones for our work and personal lives, we went to a Nextel/Sprint store that night. The people there weren't very informative, but we learned about the prices through a brochure. We signed up for a plan, but they were having problems entering our information into the computer. We couldn't get our phones until the next day, but they did throw in two free car chargers for our troubles. We had no problem with the Nextel service at our apartment. The only bad thing about Nextel was that the plan we signed up for was an introductory rate, which we were not told about.

After breaking up with my fiancé, I left him in charge of the Nextel phones and I got a Verizon phone. I went to Best Buy to sign up and bought the pink Razor phone. The set-up there was very easy and quick. I signed up for the cheapest package since I don't use a lot of my minutes. Verizon has been a very good cell phone provider this far. I have had to call them to get my package changed and get a text messaging package and I have had the most pleasant experience with their customer service. It was taking a while to get my text messaging put on, so I had a conversation with the representative about our respective plans for the weekend. I didn't feel like I was on the phone for business, I felt like I was on the phone with an old friend.

I have only had one dropped call with Verizon in over three months with their service. I live out in the middle of nowhere and I never got the best service out there with Nextel, but with Verizon, I always have full service. I definitely recommend Verizon over both Cingular and Nextel, due to their great customer service and reliability.