This motivated me to share my story on long story phones. As I mentioned, I had been a long time Sprint customer. With the lack of deals on phones that they were doing at the time I was ready to switch, I started looking at ATT & Verizon. I decided if I was going to pay Sprint's going rates at the time with no phone deal any better than VZW or ATT, I wanted to get better coverage. Thus I tested our unlocked iPhone 6 phones on Cricket to test ATT. I loiked it, but still heard that Verizon was best.
In the meantime, I had seen an ad for a T-mobile offer called "Get Out of the Red" where they were offering to pay up to $650 per line for people willing to switch from Verizon. The catch was that you had to have been a Verizon customer for 60 days. Since I wanted to test each network, I went ahead and purchased 4 iPhone 8+ from Verizon while they had a buy one-get one promotion on an installment plan using monthly credits. I stayed with them for my 60 days and switched under the promotion to go ahead and give TMO a chance. I immediately sent in my authorizations for the $650 credit per line. I think all in, the rebate for $2600 on a Mastercard debit card came in at about 40 days. This was just in time for my final bill from VZW. I paid off my phones.
I used TMO for 2 months and decided it was not for us. So, after giving each major network a 2 month run, we decided that the ATT network was best for us where we lived and roamed to most often. I've now been on Cricket for almost two years with no complaints.
Now for the bad:
The 4 unlimited lines for $100 plan is technically throttled at 3Mb/s and videos are typically shown at 480p rates. On a phone, I have not noticed a problem with video quality even if I use AirPlay to our Apple TV 4th gen. Note that I still have a 1080 p TV and no 4k Apple TV. I have seen rates occasionally up to 10-15 Mb/s. Cricket does, or at least used to, offer a plan with higher speeds. I think it was a whopping $160 for 4 lines. We decided that the "slower" plan worked for us. I have been able to watch games streaming on WatchESPN while we were at HS marching band competitions in NC, Atlanta and Indianapolis. Now that my youngest is in a college marching band/dance line, I have had trouble streaming at her Div IA school football games in rural Alabama with attendance of about 12,000. However, when I carried a VZW phone for work I had the same issues to some extent. I think there it is just a lack of network build out for all the carriers. I am sure as a CW customer, I get less priority than a full-fledged ATT customer. BOth of my daughters are heavy users. The youngest has gone over 22gb in a month twice, but said she did not notice a significant drop off. She was able to still watch videos on the phone and cast to the TV. The phone was her primary television device rather than cable or satellite. We all also routinely stream Netflix, DirecTV Now, Hulu and/or Amazon Prime Video while on road trips.