Metro PCS Review

[RJM62]

A few months ago, I bought a cell phone and service plan for my 10-year-old goddaughter. She wanted Metro PCS because her friends have it, and the coverage is good where she lives (Philly).

I was impressed with the service and the price: Unlimited everything for $50.00 / month plus tax for the top-level plan, and [ EDIT: she did not experience any dropped calls /EDIT ]. Also, my third LG Voyager phone on my previous Verizon plan was starting to give me trouble (buzzing whenever the screen was flipped up) and Verizon was balking at replacing it, having done so twice before for various other problems.

So I decided to try Metro PCS myself on a trial basis (there's no contract). I live in New York City where the coverage is good, and travel frequently within New Jersey, parts of Connecticut, and Northern Pennsylvania. Here are my impressions:

1. Coverage

Metro's coverage areas are very limited and concentrated around major Metropolitan areas. But the service is very good within those areas.

I get very good signal in all of New York City, the lower part of Westchester County, Long Island out to about Manorville, anywhere I've been in New Jersey (basically Newark, Lawrenceville, and the I-95 and US-1 corridors), and Philadelphia and its suburbs. This probably accounts for 95 percent of my travel area.

When I'm not in Metro's coverage area, I'm told I can roam on another carrier's network (Verizon's, I think) for 19 cents a minute (the money has to be deposited in advance, as it's a pre-pay service). The phone has a diffferent ring for roaming, so I can choose whether to answer. But I haven't actually had to make or received a roaming call yet.

2. Phone

Phones can be had for as little as $39.00. I chose the Samsung Messenger, which was $169.00 with new activation. It has good audio quality, decent displays, and a slide-out keyboard for text messaging. It also has MP3 functionality (which I have not used), a basic 1.3 MP camera (which I have used and which works about as well as can be expected from a 1.3 MP camera) and a Web browser (which I also have used, and have found to be adequate, but not spectacular). It also has a built-in email client that works, but which lacks support for many attachment types.

The phone doesn't seem to support videos at all, which I personally couldn't care less about, but which some people might. Battery life is decent at about four hours of talk and several days standby.

3. Customer Service

Mixed. The waits are long, and the operators are obviously from somewhere overseas; but the one I got was knowledgeable and helpful once I did get through.

Most people will never have to call customer service. The bill can be paid by phone, online, or at any Metro PCS store. The only reason I called customer service was because I live in a different service area than my goddaughter, and my local store couldn't activate a phone in her service area.

4. Price

Hard to beat, with plans as inexpensive as $40.00 a month for unlimited talk and text. At the highest level plan, I'm still saving about ninety dollars a month compared to what I was paying before. Additional numbers on the same account are discounted (10 percent, I think).

All in all, I'm satisfied with Metro PCS's service. If you spend all or most of your time in their coverage areas, make a lot of calls, rarely need customer support, and want a flat-rate unlimited plan, then I'd say Metro PCS probably is a decent choice. If you frequently roam outside their service area or require frequent support, then not so much.

-Rich

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Unlimited everything for $50.00 / month plus tax for the top-level plan, and no dropped calls.

Rich,

Curious what you mean here by "no dropped calls" considering that's a technical impossibility.

 

[RJM62]

Rich,

Curious what you mean here by "no dropped calls" considering that's a technical impossibility.

That was a pretty bad grammatical construction on my part. It incorrectly implied that "no dropped calls" was part of the package.

What I meant was that I was impressed with the price, that I was also impressed with the service, and that she did not experience any dropped calls due to signal or service problems.

Sorry about that.

-Rich

 

[ScottM]

What I meant was that I was impressed with the price, that I was also impressed with the service, and that she did not experience any dropped calls due to signal or service problems.

Dropped calls account for less than 1% of the network traffic in a commercial system. Access failures, which are different than dropped calls are usually less than a .5%. When people are experiencing dropped calls it is mostly likely coverage or capacity issues. For coverage issues people tend to stay in the same areas , such as commuting the same way home. So the effect is that a few people will end up getting more than their fair share of the dropped calls while the network averages remain constant. For them it is time to find a different carrier. That is their only real solution. Unless of course they are dropping in a Nimby area in which case everyone has bad coverage.

BTW Dropped call is a call that is dropped once the connection to an end point is made.

An access failure is a drop that occurs before call completion.

They are differentiated because the mechanism that can cause each are different. Access failures tend to be less an RF coverage issue and more of a network resource issue. One of those issue could be transit trunks or traffic channel availability.

Drop calls have had all of the network resource allocated and assigned. So they tend to indicate RF coverage issues.

But even then drops and access failures are further paratoed into sub groups that network technicians will review. Good operators look at daily stats and will dispatch system engineers to solve trouble spots. Yes the commercial of the Verizon guys doing the 'can you hear me know' stuff is based on reality.