MetroPCS is GhettoPCS, don't trust them

I have only heard negative things of them in the bay area and sacto.

 

we at radio shack feast on metro pcs custmers. no one can beat their "unlimited minutes" plan; however their service is crap.

we know them as:

ghetro pcs, or
metro piece'a sh**

so mean, hehehe

 

Metro PCS is supposedly going to try and build a network in the Los Angeles, CA area. What a laugh!

 

Metro PCS now has the license for the #2 market in the US.
They do have a roaming agreement with VZW.

Hard to say what they will do with the LA market.
Will there wireless plans be like this??? Unlimited minutes on our 20 towers in LA with so many roaming minutes on VZW network?

They are also building a network in Detroit and I think Dallas??

 

I know two people who had Metro PCS in the Sacramento area and they both had problems with their coverage. One ended up switching to Sprint PCS and the other one went to Cingular. Both of them are happy with their current service provider and get much better coverage than they did with Metro PCS. Metro seems to build out their markets poorly. I've heard nothing but bad things about them in San Fran, Sacramento, and Atlanta.

 

I have never heard of Meto PCS until now. If they only have 20 towers as AgentHillbilly stated, all of their customers would be roaming. Hopefully, they cut a really good roamong deal with Verizon.

 

A good network here in the Los Angeles market requires somewhere around 1,500 to 2,000 towers/cell sites for a 1900 Mhz carrier. No chance they can afford that or get that many approved in today's NIMBY world.

 

Funny how MetroPCS can do such a horrible job, but Leap's CricKet is doing a good job, at least in the Salt Lake City market. Their coverage has been ever expanding and has expanded further north and south, and now even includes the town of Tooele. I was amazed to see CricKet service there last week.
A lot of people in my area use them, and are quite happy.

 

Is Cricket confined to Utah? I have heard of them, howerver, they are not very high profile.

 

I thought Cricket was in Phoenix AZ as well.

 

Cricket actually serves a lot more markets than Metro PCS does. In Tennessee, Cricket has coverage in Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville. I think you don't hear about Cricket as much is because they have better coverage in their markets. You only hear about Metro PCS because everybody gripes about how awful they are. From what I've seen though Cricket customers are usually happy with their service and have no complaints.

 

That's because Metro PCS tries to take on tougher markets to build out. Cricket takes on easier ones so it's easy for them to build good coverage.

 

Metro PCS is just lazy when it comes to coverage. Take Sacramento for example. Sacramento itself is pretty flat and it's not exactly the most NIMBY part of California. Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Cingular all serve that area well. Metro PCS on the other hand is even poor right in the city. My friend Matt that now lives in Olivehurst use to live in downtown Sacramento. He had Metro PCS and his phone was awful. While in his apartment he always dropped calls and got garbled. Even when he would go outside his phone would drop calls but not cut out as much. My other friend, Nick whom I haven't talked to in a while lived in Citrus Heights and use to have Metro PCS also. He complained of very poor coverage with them and that half the time his phone didn't ring even when it had service.

 

What amazes me about Metro is their dirt cheap pricing on some stuff- unlimited SMS/PIC for $3 a month I believe.
CricKet, for example, has unlimited everything, including pix/flix/SMS, Anytime minutes for $45 a month which is dirt cheap. I still don't really understand their "travel time" though, how much it costs and how many minutes it gives you.

 

If you can't use the service because you can't get a signal when you need it, then it is not worth $.02. :twocents:

 

You're absolutely right, Jim. That's why I am amazed at CricKet's low prices but great customer service and service quality.

 

...and their very first market, Chattanooga

(although they are a tad handicapped in that area compared with the other Tennessee cities because of a lack of licenses outside the immediate metro area -- the Chattanooga BTA is tiny and doesn't include Cleveland or Dalton, GA, areas which are important to a lot of people. Cricket's coverage in Chattanooga is actually quite good, but their network is rather oversold and has audio quality problems as a result; my technophobic mother can pretty much tell immediately by ear when someone is calling from a Cricket phone, and for the large part refuses to talk to people who are on Cricket phones!)

As for Metro, their not having coverage in one of the most upscale suburbs of Atlanta (Peachtree City) is rather telling as to what their target demographic is. What other carrier deliberately ignores upscale areas? NIMBY, schnimby...no other carrier, not even AWS (who had the smallest footprint of all Atlanta carriers other than Metro), had problems building sites in PTC.

-SC

 

It isn't so much terrain/geography, population density or lack thereof, or the ability to get zoning as simple population -- Metro builds out very large metro areas, while Cricket builds out smaller and mid-sized cities for the most part (Phoenix and Denver, of course, are the major exceptions.)

-SC

 

I had Metro PCS in south Florida and it worked great. It was incredably cheap for unlimited-everything. There was no contract and no cancelation fee. Its an awesome service. Never had problems. I'm in California now and I am anticipating Metro PCS to sweep over LA, if they can do like they did in Florida it will be great.

 

Metro Poorly Crafted Service

Look at it this way they will probably only get better.

 

They're using a very effective buildout plan here in the LA market which inlcudes using a new 5 sector cell site style instead of the usual 3 sector like other carriers use. 5 sectors give each cell site better coverage range because no areas are missed unlike the traditional 3 sector sites. I wish the other carriers would learn from that and start using that as well.

 

I agree to a point, I think we should use a 4 sector set up. It would look like a diamond on the tower. If you have to much overlap you will ping pong back and forth between the sectors. If you look back at CDMA history is was originally designed to use a 6 sector hexagon panel setup.

A five sector is odd, all the equipment is pre-set up to run up to 3 sector.

Omni sites use the alpha portion.

Bi-sector uses alpa and beta

tri uses all three.

 

6 sectors would be awesome! I wonder why they don't use that?

 

Very interesting to hear about Metro's cell site setup. Do you think you could upload some pics into the gallery sometime, larry?

 

Yeah I'll do that soon. Their putting up so many sites around here it's crazy. About as many as the other carriers have and it took the other carriers 10 years to get them all up. It's really odd that they have the money to do that when they're such as small company. Usually carriers come into a market slowly and once they launch service and take on some customers they will then do an expansion. But Metro hasn't even signed up a single customer yet but somehow have the money to make a massive network. Of course this area is VERY easy to put up cell sites. I bet they're going to have a much harder time in the NIMBY areas like Santa Monica, Thousand Oaks, Beverly Hills, Hollywood Hills, Downey, etc.

 

That is great to hear that they are putting up so many sites. I think your view about that company may be changing a little.
You know, Metro can(and it looks like they are on the right track) attract a huge customer base down there if they succeed with coverage, features, and a positive correlation with their name- that's probably why they are trying to get as many towers up as they can before launching service in order not to ruin their name. I bet you a lot of people who stay close are going to sign up for this service- Cricket has tons of subscribers in my area.

 

Well I still don't see them taking away too many customers from the other carriers here for a long time. It will probably be another 8-12 months before they turn on service. Whether or not it's as good in other parts of LA and OC remains to be seen. I still think they're not going to make a good return on their investment.

 

There going to have to jack prices. The stockholders wont like a low ARPU rate versus the money their putting in the network.

 

Metro actually kicks butt in almost every market they launch in.

Whether or not they can offer a quality network is location dependant, but there are enough people out there who don't travel or make calls outside their local markets.

Metro customers are not technology whores and could care less about jargon like: EVDO Rev A, WCDMA, Wi-Max etc. They just want cheap wireless phone service that works in their home area.

Personally, I would not subscribe. I'm also not their target audience.