I can't really complain when my wife was sending MMS pics back home of Burning Man from inside our RV. That's coverage.
Is this really that much of a problem? Coming from an Aussie who is used to having no mobile access at all (not even emergency) driving between major cities.
As a fellow Aussie, lack of coverage is why I moved (back) to Telstra; outside of the major cities, only Telstra has reasonable coverage. Whenever I visit my parents in Gympie (~2 hours north of Brisbane, ~20,000 people), my previous carrier (Vodafone) couldn't connect me in the town's main street. Optus could only do so at a certain corner. With Telstra, I receive ~2mbps in the middle of my parents' farm. The difference in coverage between Telstra and its competitors is extreme.
Yet, Optus and Vodafone are two major carriers with millions of customers. Optus and Vodafone are not much cheaper than Telstra. But this small price difference (I'd actually be paying more for my equivalent plan with Vodafone..) is apparently (according to those millions of Optus and Vodafone customers) worth sacrificing a huge amount of coverage for.
tl;dr - Aussies don't seem to care that much about coverage, just price.
That said, if I needed a month of stop-gap coverage on the cheap, I'd definitely use the service again.
Edit: Oh, and we've just moved to Christchurch. I think it's a similar story here w/ coverage between cities, but obviously the distances involved are much, much smaller.
It depends on your current data plan. I was capped at 50MB and they sent me an SMS when I hit 40 alerting me to possible overuse. I just turned off data roaming in the Android settings and everything was fine.
Emphasis mine.
My wife and I got the $30 100 minute/"unlimited" data plan as a stop-gap before leaving the country to move abroad. Before leaving we drove from SC, to MA, to CT, to NY, on over to WI. Unless we were near a major city, our devices were roaming on to AT&T, where we only had 10MB of data to use. The voice coverage was fine while roaming, but since we were using one of the phones as a GPS to navigate, it got annoying at times.
Now this is a cut-rate plan that's full of limitations, and we knew that, but still the service we received was much worse than we expected. I'd strongly advise anyone considering T-mobile to check the roaming agreement.