I rarely hear of people who are happy with their cell carrier regardless of where they're from. In Germany we have three major providers: Telekom (the parent company of T-Mobile), Vodafone and o2 (which belongs to Spanish Telefonica). By all accounts they're all terrible from a customer service perspective.

I just had o2 renew my contract rather than cancel it as I explicitly demanded and it took me a week of regular calls to customer service to get it fixed. I want to switch but it feels like I am between the devil and the deep blue sea.

It's why I get everything on monthly pay as you go only. I'm not sure of the utility of a contract from the consumer perspective. The only thing it does is reduce your flexibility.

It does do another thing: it gives you access to a better deal, generally speaking. But I'm also considering biting that bullet.

fwiw the "better deals" build their value proposition on buying a new phone every two years and smuggle the price of the phone into your tax deductibles. generally the deals are mid- to high-tier priced but have good overall value if you want video on the go and are complicit with beeing a part in the hardware churn industry.

on the other side you get low-end deals w/o contract for <100euro per year (call/sms flatrate plus some data) if you bring your own phone.

Phone purchases outside of a contract are also partially tax deductible if used for your job in Germany. And while many deals are attractive only if you buy a device, not all of them are. Right now I could get a 24 month contract from Vodafone for an average price of 12 EUR/month with 20GB of mobile data.

On the other hand, Lidl Connect (which uses Vodafone's network) charges 12.99 EUR/4 weeks for 6GB of data w/o contract. If you know of any non-contract options that offer significantly better value, please do let me know.

It really depends how you use your data but I never use more than the 10gb that I pay for so having more data isn’t an attraction. I also buy a new (to me) second hand iPhone every 2 years and the phones are perfectly good.

WinSIM is 7.99€/6GB, PremiumSIM 8.99€/6GB, both with month-to-month contracts. Not sure which networks though.

winsim is drillisch, which is just about starting its own network, mostly resells telefonica like most cheap options (incl. premiumsim).

idk but everytime i call someone and the call quality is abysmal, that person is on telefonica network.

I've been happy with Drillisch, but to be fair I call very rarely and even then it's a Telegram/WhatsApp call.

yea, that vodafone deal sounds good value if you need the data.

guess im an outlier because i rarely use more than a few hundred MB a month, so even 12e/mon is "too damn high".

That's fair. I don't always need that much data, but I need it often enough that it's worth having it and not having to worry about it, e.g. when visiting family who don't have internet at home, just working outside or traveling.

I've also been in the situation of not having non-mobile internet at home and I had to deal with insufficient data caps for years, so I may also be biased towards avoiding that in the future.

Germany has a wealth of minor providers, thanks to the MVNO system. No reason whatsoever to be on a major cell provider when a small one is fraction of the price and cancellable monthly instead of yearly.

I've had good results with Ting since 2016, and their telephone and chat customer service in particular has been excellent, but Dish recently bought them to rebrand as "Dish Mobile" and I don't know how that's going to play out.

Their staff on Reddit are denying this applies to them.

I assume by "this" you mean the latest Tmo privacy abuse, and I wouldn't expect it to apply to Ting. They're a Tmo MVNO, but all that means is that they resell Tmo's wireless backhaul; they are under no obligation to otherwise treat their customers the way Tmo does, and in my experience, they don't.

Ting's privacy policy says this about it, and has done since I've been a customer:

"We do not sell or share your information with any third-parties so they can market to you."

Unfortunately, T-Mobile's probably the "least bad" of the Big Three. Maybe one of the smaller carriers running on the Big Three's towers?

I’d recommend looking into Verizon’s discount carrier Visible. I switched a few months ago and am very happy. With “party pay” each member of a party pays their own bill. If your party is 4 or more, you get unlimited calling, text, and data for $25/mo. You can also turn your phone into a hotspot but are limited to 5mbps. Since the network is still Verizon, I still get great service but no longer need to pay a premium price.

I assume any traffic from an MVNO is lower priority than from an Verizon/ATT/T-Mobile payer, simply because in a congestion situation it makes sense to me that the mobile networks would prioritize whoever they get more money from.

I wonder how true that is.

As a Visible customer, I can say the speeds are downgraded. It used to be that if you made it down to 5Mbps, you'd have to call them and your speed will go back up to ~25Mbps. The last few calls have resulted in no speed increases. Time of day doesn't matter so I don't believe their congestion story. They do allow for tethering one device. It's only $40/month and works out well if you just need a slow connection at some location.

That's true, MVNO and prepaid are often deprioritized from the start, while postpaid gets deprioritized only after consuming say 22 GB/month.

And the other trade-off is the "real customers" get to roam on other telco's towers (in some scenarios, depending on partnership agreements), while MVNO and/or prepaid often don't.

I was really happy with Republic Wireless, and would still be using them, though am currently on ATT due to circumstances.

Unfortunately, they are being purchased by DISH network.

I switched from republic to Mint sim (now mint mobile) a few years ago and haven't looked back.

You don’t really have any options because US society heavily favors corporations over human beings. Always has, always will.

I agree, thanks for the help. I am glad I unchecked them again.. As its been said before, we need better privacy laws. We could start with opt in being mandatory for specific services. Start with telecoms. If they were using AI to listen in and process voice 'data'.. I don't know. Sure I would hear the good old, if ya got nothing to hide..

Visible. $25/month and they use the term "Unlimited" literally. No throttling after a certain amount used. 5G included, but it's always throttled at 200Mbps. Verizon network. I normally get 30-40Mbps on 4G.

Only downsides are US/Mexico/Canada only and it's pay as you go but you can't pay more than a week before the bill is due. Autopay is an option.

I have one line for my phone and one I use for home internet.

They do throttle tethering to 5Mbps, but that's easy enough to work around by making the TTL of the device you need full speed match the TTL of the phone by the time it gets there. (68 IIRC) For example, the connection I'm using now is desktop->router->linux box->phone, so I set my desktop TTL to 71.

I have no idea how bad they are with data collection, though.

Visible is owned by Verizon but they try to hide that fact.

From above the fold at visible.com:

"And we're the wireless service that gets better with friends. For as little as $25/mo, you’ll get unlimited data, messages and minutes—powered by Verizon, now with 5G included. Oh, one last thing: Every time you refer a friend, you’ll get a month of service for $5."

That says powered but it's actually owned, not an innocent MVNO

Yuck. I just switched to them from Verizon who I left for scummy business practice. On to the next carrier, AT&T.

AT&T is the absolute worst of the three IMO. Poorest offering, highest cost.

Their prepaid plan is only $25/mo w/ 8gb lte when prepaid the year in advance. That's wayyy cheaper than any of the other big players, and their network/coverage is supposed to be better than t-mobile (and almost as good as verizon).

>That's wayyy cheaper than any of the other big players

T-Mobile has a $15/mo prepaid plan without having to pay a year in advance.

I'm using Mint, but they only do phones, so you can't bundle with stuff like tv or internet

I mean, the same can be said about T-Mobile, which to my knowledge offers neither of those things (unless you count the free Netflix).

T-Mobile currently offers home internet access in some areas, and they have a new streaming video service called TVision.

Huh. Guess I learn something new every day.

They recently introduced their own cable-TV-like streaming service.

Consumer Cellular