"Preferred Network Plans" and Locking Onto Them?

The roaming in the middle of a call thing pretty much won't happen very often... Nearly every carrier I've had any experience with will drop the call before it picks up the roaming signal so as not to get inadvertent roaming charges. Sprint probably has the best protection of the bunch... You can set it to SprintPCS only AND if you don't do that, you can set a call guard so it takes an extra step to place/answer a roam call.

 

do any carriers even support a digital to analog handoff?

 

CDMA can handoff to analog but not back to CDMA. TDMA can do both handoff to analog and back.

Smokehouse, there's no way to set the phone to lock it onto Cingular or AT&T.

 

Both Cingular and AT&T include other carriers (AT&T includes some Cingular areas, for example) on their preferred plans. Therefore, you can't lock your phone onto 1 carrier's signal like you can with Sprint. In my experience, I've never seen Analog hand off to TDMA duriong a call, but I'm sure it can/does happen. It's very unlikely you will switch from a network tower to a roaming tower while in a call. That only happens if you are on the very edge of an area that is supposed to be covered.

 

Well, I've got one of the old nation plans on cingular...$50/month for 500/3500 mins. Never roaming, and since they have agreements with AT&T, I get basically a plan that uses all AT&T -and- Cingular! What could be better? And cingular is switching to GSM, and then it will pick up Cingular and AT&T for GSM too! Maybe if you go in to a cingular store you can somehow get a rep to give you one of the old plans. I know some ppl who did that at cingular. good luck

 

Even with the new Nation Preferred plans you roam on AT&T and some other, smaller carriers with Cingular.

 

Inter-system handoff does exist, but is rather rare; I know of a few places in the Atlanta area where AT&T TDMA hands off to Cingular TDMA (but once a call goes to Cingular it stays there), and VZW does CDMA handoffs between its Dalton GA and east TN systems and between its Dalton and Atlanta systems.

As for AT&T vs. Cingular, I say go with AT&T if local coverage is acceptable, simply because you have a better chance of getting a usable signal than with Cingular (AT&T roams with VZW analog and other carriers that Cingular doesn't, although in the Northeast a lot of VZW systems are blocked to AT&T customers and it might not help as much. Still, Cingular's roaming seems to be much more "fragile" than any other major carrier.)

-SC

 

Cingular Nation Preferred includes dozens of carriers; AT&T National Network includes the AT&T network (including affiliates) and a few Cingular areas (Florida Keys, much of north GA north of Atlanta, IIRC all of NJ and CT, etc.) and maybe one or two others (Dobson?)

-SC

 

In the northeast, in my experience, you can go from roaming to non-roaming areas seamlessly without dropping the call from AT&T to Cingular and back to AT&T. Both Cingular and AT&T TDMA coverage is very reliable in most of the northeast and you would be hard pressed to find an area where there's no signal. However, if you are getting a Preferred Nation plan you can always roam in places where both carriers have overlapping coverage because the phone can seamlessly switch from one carrier to the other even though the phone is programmed to prefer its home carrier.