Who still carries unlimited data plans for computers for cheap in L.A., CA, USA?

Note that T-mob is throttled after 5Gbytes. I never hit the limit, so I don't know how bad they throttle it. T-mob also eliminated tethering when roaming. This doesn't happen often except in rural areas. You can download what you want on the phone, but no tethered. It seems stupid to me since I can just pull the memory chip out of the phone and put it in the computer if need be.

If T-mob is just weak at home, you can UMA on many of their phones. I don't find T-mob to be a problem in socal, but socal is a big place. I'm sure there are pockets of bad coverage that I never wandered into.

T-mob on the iphone is 2G unless things have changed.

Yeah, it is in the rural areas for the very weak/no T-Mobile service. :(

Ah.

You might want to check with current T-mob owners in your area. Sometimes T-mob is better than AT&T. A tower here or there makes a big difference.

UMTS doesn't have a hard distance limit like GSM. With GSM, regardless of signal strength, you need to be within 35km. That is the theoretical limit based on timing, and you get very close to that in real life. But UMTS is similar to CDMA. Its limit is based on SNR, though in urban areas probably capacity is a bigger deal. I don't know if it throttles you down with SNR. The only phones I've owned drop you down to 2G if the

There are a few crowd sourced apps for sharing cell phone reception quality, but there just aren't enough geeks using them to make them useful.

If your goal is to use once device for home and mobile, i.e. skip out on DSL or cable at the house, forget it. A bandwidth hog on wire is tolerable, but I doubt any wireless company will tolerate such users. Like I said, even T-mobs unlimited plan is throttled.

I'm grandfathered in at $25 for unlimited data, but I don't abuse it.

We had T-Mobile until we moved, but it sucks so we went to Verizon.

OK how about using it as a backup if TWC cable goes down which does happen. :(