My recent switch to Verizon Wireless

After over ten years of being a Sprint customer I have switched to Verizon. I started to sway a couple of months ago I tried out a demo line of a Motorola Droid Bionic and was very impressed with the 4G LTE coverage and speeds. Everywhere that I went that had Verizon coverage in town, I had 4G coverage. Coming from the 2.5Ghz spectrum that Sprint uses for their Wi-Max coverage and lack of building penetration, this was quite a treat.

A few weeks later, I met my brother Stan for some drinks and ran a speed test on his phone and pulled over 25Mbps down which is pretty amazing! I was struggling with the cost increase that a switch from Sprint but was very tempted with the network. Another example is at our family cabin, I have fought with poor coverage for years while this last summer I saw our neighbors making calls and streaming Slacker music on 3G without issue.

Verizon has been extremely agressive in their rollout of their LTE network and says that they will have their existing 3G coverage map completely covered with 4G LTE by the end of 2013. There is speculation that Verizon will then aggressively push for voice over LTE at that time and repurpose the 3G spectrum over time for additional LTE capacity.

This article written over a year ago shows the difference between Verizon’s 4G coverage at that time versus Sprint’s which has not grown much in the Twin Cities over the past year.

Shown below is the coverage growth over the last few months from early November 2011 through mid December 2011

Most of 2011…

November 17th growth

December growth – new markets in Duluth and Rochester

Verizon is not shy about showing off their coverage difference with Sprint as they have the following sign in stores

Sprint is working on their Network Vision roll out which is a great plan that leverages partners to help them build out their network. This deployment is supposed to be completed around the end of 2013. The re-purposing of the iDen spectrum will prove to be a great asset to Sprint’s 4G expansion. I am very excited to see what they have to offer at that time because I love their open model and pricing. This post is to no way rip on Sprint. I feel that they are still a great carrier with a very strong pricing advantage and because of that, I will continue to recommend Sprint to people. I have multiple family members on Sprint and I would not try to convince them to switch. For a power user like myself, I found the current 4G footprint too limiting and am paying for it every month with Verizon.