Cell service for Buffalo, NY

First, I want to thank people who post to this forum. I've been reading it for about 8 months and received a lot of helpful advice.

I've been a Sprint customer for about 4 years and fortunately, my plan is now just month to month since the last contract expired. I live right in the City of Buffalo and, contrary to what the Sprint reception maps claim, I've noticed poorer and poorer reception in the City. Reception is good in the suburbs, but on the west side and downtown, I often can't get a signal.

Does anyone familiar with this area have any suggestions for a good replacement service? The phones will be used in the Northeast, in Buffalo, and Pittsburgh.

By the way, my current Sprint contract gives me minutes over the plan for 5 cents a minute. I guess that's a thing of the past - Sprint, Verizon, etc all charge 20 cents or more a minute if you go over the plan. Also, it looks like Sprint is one of the few that start night calls at 7PM.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Thanks for the suggestions. A couple of questions.

1) The Sprint and Verizon plans look like they are the same price. I'm interested in the 3000 minute plan - they are both about $150. Am I missing something there?

2) I could swallow my pride and just buy another Sprint phone and try it on my existing plan to see if I can improve my reception. The phone in Pittsburgh works fine. If I do that, any suggestions about a Sprint phone with the best reception? I just need a flip phone - no Internet, pictures, etc. Bluetooth would be nice.

Thanks again.

 

The phones are Samsung - A660 and A880 and Sanyo 8100.

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The plan is from February 2005 and it has free roaming. There's an interesting thing about roaming with Sprint on Verizon. I've found that Sprint blocks access locally to some Verizon towers. I've often hit a Verizon tower, only to get a Verizon message telling me that the number I've dialed isn't a valid number. The number is in fact valid.

This actually used to happen a lot, and I complained a lot about it. Finally after lots of complaints, I got a Sprint customer service rep who told me to dial the local area code to get access to the Verizon towers. That works about half the time.

I have no trouble out of state. The same rep who told me about dialing the area code told me that Sprint simply does not let people access every tower. It's a cost thing for them.

 

I was pretty amazed by this. It's something they didn't tell me when I signed up for free roaming.

I suspect that if there are not a lot of users around a particular tower, they just don't pay to accessthe tower. Unfortunately, all three of the phones have this problem in parts of the west side, and other Sprint users here have the same problem.

This also happened at Holiday Valley when we were skiing a couple of years ago. Just Verizon towers - and the number wasn't found. They may have changed the coverage at this ski area now, but I coudn't call other family members who were within 300' of me.

 

Yes. I had it done about two weeks ago.

 

I've called them for the last year and have gotten nowhere. I've also emailed support. I get the same answer every time - "bring the phone in." Then they check the phone and tell me it's ok. When it still works the same way and I complain, the say "bring the phone in."

It's like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day"

I can't replicate the problem in the store because I guess they don't usually put the stores in places where coverage is bad.

So I'm going to do the only thing I can do - switch to another service.

You are probably right. The account was probably screwed up in some way. But the phones with the most usage worked and the account was inexpensive; so I kept it. Now that I'm at the end of it, I'll move on.

Based on your advice, I'm looking at Cingular. I think I'll get royally screwed if I don't get nights and weekends starting at 7 PM. Verizon doesn't offer that. They might offer it on some corporate accounts but I can't get access to a corporate account.

 

I went with Cingular. It works much better than my Sprint account did.

Thanks for all the help.