Well, for many people when your inside of your home you may Loose some signal. This would, in turn, lower your speed becasue you don't have a great or stable connection to the Edge or 3G network for your carrier. If you have WiFi at home, you can use that and not worry about the network being unstable inside of your house. Or some people use it to alleviate the date flow from their "cap" per monthly, or some just don't have a data plan at all, but still have a phone that can browse the net, so when your in a WiFi area, turn it on, and browse with no cost to you!

What is the advantage of using WIFI from your phone? I've heard of people doing it, but don't understand how it would help out over the cell towers.

I am not sure about the programing of the phone, someone here maybe able to help you with that. I can tell you that you can get an unlocked CDMA phone and use it on Alltell from Ebay, and you can have the phone utilize WiFi networks.

Hello all, thanks for your wonderful advice. I am currently shopping for a new phone, but I don't have time to go the store and deal with my people and have opted to buy a phone from ebay instead. I was wondering about the two following things:

Can any phone I buy be programmed under my service provider (Alltel), regardless of who usually sells the phone?

Also, if I'm programming the phone myself, which I'm told is easy, is it possible to program a phone to pick up wireless networks instead of buying a data plan from my provider?

Thanks!