I fear I might start a flame war with this ... well, actually I don't fear
it; it might even be entertaining.

A couple weeks ago, I finally decided it was time to move up from my two old
AT&T TDMA phones. I also needed a third phone, so that required some sort of
a new plan. I got three Razr phones with a Cingular family plan (550
minutes). One handy feature that my old phones didn't have was the ability
to sound a tone whenever it passes in or out of a no-service area. While
driving home one day on the secondary roads, I found that I was in a
no-service area for almost half of my 25-mile commute. During this time, I
saw other people talking on their phones, so it appears someone was getting
service. Also, I found that almost all of our friends had Verizon and
claimed that they got great service everywhere. This is in Northern
Westchester County, NY.

Given that Verizon apparently had better coverage and we would have someone
to talk with with our "In" minutes, I finally decided to sign up for Verizon
and do some comparisons. I ordered three Razr phones from Verizon and they
arrived today - V3M model. I spent a lot of time driving around the Danbury
area and northern Westchester, and I have to report, to my surprise, that
Cingular has had better coverage, better signal strength, and much clearer
sound. It's difficult to tell from looking at the phones. The Cingular phone
goes up to five bars; the Verizon phone goes up to four. Sometimes I was
able to get a clear signal on Verizon with zero bars; other times I got a
very staticy poor quality signal with four bars. The quality of the sound
coming from the Cingular phone has been generally comparable to the number
of bars. If you have zero bars, you can be quite certain that you have no
service. In fact, it seems I rarely get a bad signal from Cingular; it's all
or nothing.

Verizon's 700-minute plan costs about the same as Cingular's, but I doubt
we'll ever use that many minutes, so for us, the 550-minute plan is a better
deal. The V3M has more features and a more refined looking user interface,
but I'm really going to miss the ability to transfer photos and [url=http://www.unlimitedcomplimentaryringtones.com]Ringtones[/url] by
Bluetooth. International roaming with GSM sounds like a nice thing to have,
but in reality, it's entirely possible that I might never leave the USA
during the lifetime of this phone. And even if I do, roaming is so expensive
that I wouldn't want to do it even if I could. I do wonder how much of a
contribution the analog towers make to Verizon's much-vaunted superior
coverage. In rural areas, it appears much of the coverage is analog, which
would do me no good with an all-digital phone.

Based on what I've seen (and heard) so far, I honestly have to say that
Cingular is winning. Could it be that Verizon's better coverage is all a
myth, perpetuated by a well-orchestrated advertising campaign? I won't have
time to travel around extensively to test the two thoroughly before one set
of phones has to go back.