T-mobile in Los Angeles & San Francisco?

I was wondering how's the reception in L.A. and S.F? I hear T-mobile uses cingular's network here in CA and the other way around in the east coast?
I want to get a gsm service here in CA I travel between the 2 cities and I'm divided between att, cingular and t-mobile.
Ant help is appreciated.

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Hey ardy first of all welcome second I think y=the answer to your post is somewhere else. I'll check around to see if I can find it.

Thanks Griffzan.

Sorry ardy I looked and looked but I can't exactly remember where I seen it I do remember it was something about the two being attached. But anymore than that I don't know sorry

NP thanks for looking.

I'm in the bay area and I use Tmobile. My service has been good actually. I transfered from Sprint who's reception was plain garbage!

Call and ask they have excellent coverage maps, not necessarily on the website but through Customer Service and at the retail T-Mobile stores with the physical address they can tell you if there is great coverage, good coverage ( outside not necessarily inside of buildings), fair coverage and no coverage.

Need at least a city, state and zip code physical address is ideal

Hey Ardy, go with TMobile, because they just bought out Cingular and AT&T within 5 years TMobile's network will be theirs anyways...and TMobile has free roaming and free LD with all of their plans, neither one of the other companies does.

Wow. tmobile bought cingular and att? where did you hear that?
The merger between cingulat and att took a while their commercial on tv is jst being aired, but t-mobile buying them out that is a sureprise.
but thanks for your reply.

It's called consolidation, Tmobile did it with Bell South, and VoiceStream before they converted them all to TMobile, it's how it works, they consolidate and by the time the merger is complete they will all be TMobile customers, whether they like it or not. When I worked for Tmobile, people would call and say they wanted to cancel because they hated Tmobile, and were switching to Cingular or ATT, and I would laugh, and let them know that TMobile had just acquired both of those companies, and would be consolidating them within the next 5 years. Havent you heard about ATT troubles? They are the worst ranked cellular company in the us. And cingular has a tiny tiny network, they are using Tmobile's network currently for most of their coverage, except in California.

Consolidation doesnt happen over night, Some of the Bell South and Voicestream people who were converted to TMobile still have screens that read the name of their previous carrier as their current network, even though they are techinically on Tmobile's network.

thanks for the info, it's good to know.

OH MY GOD!!!

T-mobile did NOT buy out Cingular and AT&T.

No offense, but I have answered a sh*t load of stupid questions here!

First of all, T-mobile is a fairly new mobile company owned by an European company called Deustche Telekomm. (German, obvisouly) Although they are financially stable, they

1) do not have that big of financial ability to buy out 2 of the biggest cellular companies in the United States.

2) The federal commission will NOT allow such monopoly to exist in the US GSM market (only 1 major GSM network)

3) Cingular, which is owned by SBC, will NOT sell.

There is, however, a recent merge between two companies and those are Cingular and ATT Wireless. Cingular acquired the ownership of ATT Wireless about an year ago, but only recently surfaced to the public.

As far as how Tmobile is in the SF Bay area and Los Angeles (I live in both the bay area and orange county), Tmobile does not have the best reception, however, does have the best voice quality. You will get fairly strong reception through out California, except a few spotty areas in the mountains. In General, now that ATT and Cingular merged, Cingular and singularly*, they now have the best coverage in CA. However, don't be discouraged. The advertised 46 million strong mobile to mobile community is true, HOWEVER, Cingular in California has been having problems with call volumes (since the company's existence back in 1998 as Pacific Bell, then later in 2001 Cingular). This means, (having had Cingular and ATT for an year each in the past) that you will get a busy signal from the network from Cingular and will NOT be able to call.

That was the reason why I switched to T-mobile and LOVE IT! True, T-mobile uses Cingular's towers in California. HOWEVER, Cingular has allotted a specific amount of the towers ability to handle calls to TMobile. That means, because Tmobile does not have as many subscribers, you will not receive the system busy message from the network. Also, no system busy means no drop calls.

So yea, Cingular does have bigger coverage areas in CA (i.e. in the mountains of Indian reservation land), but do you want that or do you want a reliable service provider with no service problems and excellent Customer serivce? (T-mobile is ranked #1 in customer service by J.D. Powers and associate)

I hope this help, I am sick of wireless carriers and I'm sharing my experience with you.

ALSO, to clarify

Cingular does not use a lot of Tmobile's towers. It's the other way around. Cingular is basically a merge of the Bell Company: Pacific Bell (CA, some OR and WA), Atlantic Bell (east coast) and a couple of other BELL companies. Now known as SBC and getting bigger. They already have a big existing network through out the US before Tmobile.

A few other companies such as Voicestream merged to form T-mobile. So T-mobile does have a significant amount of network in the US but without financial support from the Deutsche Telekomm in Europe, there is NO way that they would be competing with a giant like SBC.

ATT wireless is also big in TDMA, however, they had also just recently started the GSM network (Winter of 2002 started in Los Angeles first and received horrendous response). Cingular had been the ONLY carrier in GSM for a while, was concerned about ATT's new market in GSM. Therefore, Cingular, the SBC company, had long been eyeing on buying out ATT so they would become the biggest GSM network in America, which now they are.

Cingular will perhaps make arrangements with Tmobile in the future but the Federal Commision will not likely approve.

T-Mobile did not buy Cingular or anyother Okay i dont know where he heard Cingular was bought by T-Mobile, because Congular just acquired ATT Wireless and cingular is a part of SBC Family, yes when cingular was developing its GSM Network they did use T-Mobile's Towers but not now but yes T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless have same owners which is VodaFone both are part of that particular group of companies but operate seperately

Regarding the T-Mobile Agreement/Merger? with Cingular, I think the poster misunderstood. In May 2004, T-Mobile announced that it would be acquiring Cingular's GSM network in California and Nevada (more particularly, the spectrums they need) and then reselling it back to ATT/Cingular. Here the link:

http://www.t-mobile.com/company/pres...release100.asp

Anyhow, my contract with Verizon just came up (still think they have the best overall coverage in So. California), but I dropped them due to their high prices, and went with T-Mobile. As for T-Mobile, I chose them because I believe they are an extremely close second in coverage, better voice quality, global standards (GSM), better customer service, and much better pricing than Verizon.

So, to sum, Yes, T-Mobile has acquired Cingular's network, but not the company.