(I'm writing this up here, mostly so it's got somewhere to live on in posterity.)

Background: I have a Verizon family plan for my wife and I. Two devices: one crappy featurephone, one Galaxy Nexus with the grandfathered unlimited 4G plan. My wife, who had spent years not wanting a smartphone, finally changed her mind. I'd been pondering a switch away from Verizon after they had mysteriously shut down TCP/IP connections where I was trying to move lots of photos from my laptop back to my home server (tunneling via ssh). Past 120MB or so, the connections would just die. This happened multiple times, in multiple cities, over multiple months. It was clearly some sort of throttling engineered into their system. "Unlimited" 4G, yeah right.

T-Mobile seemed attractive, so to see how good it was doing, I picked up a Nexus 7 (2013 LTE edition), which came with one month of free service. Side by side with my Galaxy Nexus, in several cities, the T-Mobile data service was blowing Verizon out of the water. Now, several months later, Verizon is finally admitting in public that they're having capacity issues. No shock there. (The Galaxy Nexus, when it was new and Verizon didn't have many customers with LTE, was a screamer, regularly getting 20Mb/s. Today I'm lucky if I get 4Mb/s.)

Unfortunately, my Verizon lock-in doesn't end until December 15, so after much research, the game plan became:

- Activate my wife's Nexus 5 with T-Mobile, having them port her number from the dumb featurephone. While I was there, I also bolted the Nexus 7 onto the "200MB free" plan, wherein they seem to charge me $10/month and credit me another $10/month. Yeah, go figure.

- Get my employee discount attached to my new T-Mobile account. This turns out to be a huge pain. With Verizon you show your employee ID, they punch the computer, and it's all done. With T-Mobile, there are web sites and emails and more, and now that it's all "confirmed" I still have to wait "up to two billing cycles" for it to kick in.

So far, it's all straightforward. I've now got a T-Mobile plan with my wife's old number attached, and my Galaxy Nexus is still attached to Verizon on a family plan without any family. An earlier phone call with Verizon Tech #1 suggested that the plan, moving forward, was to reactive the dumb featurephone, swap the phone numbers, then port away my phone number now that it's not attached to an account with a lock-in. When I called in today to follow this plan, Verizon Tech #2 ("I've been here 15 years and what you want to do isn't going to work") insisted that my grandfathered unlimited 4G plan was inseparably bolted onto my phone number, and any change would result in the loss of my unlimited 4G. (Cue Southpark kids: "You bastards!")

So, what's next? I'm following a plan of action from Rootzwiki, posted May 28, and apparently still valid.

- I activated the other Nexus 5 with a fresh phone number, connected in a family plan with my wife's phone and my tablet.

- I called T-Mobile's "transfer center" (877-789-3106) and asked them to port my Verizon number onto the new phone.

- Minutes later, an SMS arrived on the Nexus 5 saying Welcome to T-Mobile! ... Your phone number is and it had the Verizon number.

- I immediately logged into VerizonWireless.com and used their web feature to change my mobile number. Confirmation. You now have a new mobile number. The change is effective today, November 17, 2013 ... Plan: Your plan details remains the same.

So that's at least promising. I then tried calling the old Verizon number from my home phone. "Welcome to Verizon Wireless", said the robot. My old number is now "changed, disconnected or no longer in service." Porting in progress. If I call the new mobile number that Verizon assigned to me, my Galaxy Nexus rings immediately.

Summary: The Rootzwiki method indeed appears to work. Hopefully, by tomorrow, the "port" will be complete and I'll be using my new phone on my new service and I can focus on ditching the Verizon account, wherein I need to find somebody who wants their "unlimited 4G" plan and is willing to do an "assumption of liability" from me to them. Apparently such things are going for $250-$280 on eBay. If any of you want it, let me know before I deal with the wild world of eBay lemmings.

My only complaint, for what it's worth, is that the Nexus 5 doesn't support T-Mobile's WiFi calling, and T-Mobile's signal strength in my house isn't quite as good as Verizon's.

Great summary, Dan! Doesn't it just feel better to NOT be on Verizon? Maybe it's just me, but I like it. T-Mobile is just fine in my area (outer suburbs of DC), and I'm getting LTE in several locations, though before switching to the Nexus 5 I didn't feel like my downloads were particularly slow on TMo's faster HSPA+ lines.

Plus, the fact that I'm spending $30/month for cell service feels like I'm getting away with something. It's absurd.

The only thing that hasn't been working out well with my plan is Groove IP. Someone said in another thread that I must have high standards for free voice calling, but I think that person has very LOW standards. Groove IP is useless over cellular or via bluetooth. On bluetooth, my callers get noticeably flummoxed by a terrible echo they hear.

I think I have it worked out, though. I'm set to use my plan minutes when I'm off WiFi, and Groove IP when I'm on. As Tony mentioned in the other thread, going over by 100 minutes only costs another $10, which still puts me ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS ahead of what I was paying to Verizon.

Seriously, you rock, T-Mobile...

Turns out, there's a T-Mobile base station atop our university's football stadium. That's roughly 1km from my office. When I'm outside, I get the full LTE experience and everything is grand. When I'm inside, nada.

Nonetheless, it's not like I really want people calling me anyway...

I believe T-Mobile's LTE runs all at 1700/2100mhz (AWS). Their HSPA (mislabeled 4G) runs at 1900, 1700/2100, and roams to AT&T at 850 (due to the failed merger).

The higher the frequency, the harder it is for the signal to work indoors. I pretty much rarely see LTE indoors at work or around businesses near work. But HSPA holds up solid.

T-Mobile does have a cell signal repeater they can provide if you have signal issues. Not sure the hoops you have to go through to get one for free though. It's based on the Cel-Fi product. This is an actual repeater, not a microcell that uses an internet connection.

I was chatting with one of the IT honchos for our campus, and he was mentioning that the next generation of Cisco APs can also act as repeaters for cellular networks, much like the Cel-Fi. It's some sort of plug-in module. They're pondering running this around the campus as part of their next big planned network upgrade.

I tried calling T-Mobile to complain about the reception in my house, but that was an exercise in teeth pulling, while dealing with the thoroughly incompetent person on the other end who had to keep going on hold to check on things and kept asking me questions about my phone.

What I really want now is an app that tracks signal strength over the whole day alongside GPS location and plots out what it sees. I tried one app, RF Signal Tracker, which just didn't run properly. I'm now trying out Network Signal Info. That one seems to mostly work, although if you want to extract data from it you need the "pro" version. And it mysteriously reports a high signal strength when it's disconnected from the network. Sigh.

Update: the porting process completely worked.

My Verizon account reports that my monthly bill is now $51 rather than the original $107 (that's after my 20% employer-negotiated discount, and we're talking about only one line rather than the original family plan). FYI, the new T-Mobile bill for two smartphones (one with 2.5GB of data, one with 500MB) and a tablet (at the freebie level with 200MB) is going to come out roughly the same as what I was spending on my original Verizon plan, with one smartphone and one dumb featurephone.

Also of note, I'm running my first-ever eBay auction. I set it up for seven days, no minimum bid. For the first five days, nothing. Now there are two bidders duking it out and it's up to $100 with almost two days left. This suggests I might well hit the $250-300 that I've seen on other auctions. I can also sell my Galaxy Nexus after this auction completes and I've sold off my old line.

Suffice to say that I'm entirely happy that leaving Verizon turns out to be a profitable maneuver rather than being forced to pay an early termination fee.

As to the quality of T-Mobile, I'm largely satisfied with it outdoors. It's inside that it's got serious problems. I'm hoping I can find somebody competent at T-Mobile to present with all my measurements. That's still work in progress.

Drakino and I work for a company which makes just such a thing. Only thing is, it's an enterprise-level program that reports its data back to your company server so your company can keep track of the network performance of its mobile fleet. Getting the mobile client app isn't useful unless you have the server to aggregate the data too.

Making it work perfectly (i.e., not doing things like reporting an incorrect signal strength when you're disconnected) is part of our QA effort.

Continuing my posts for posterity:

I auctioned my grandfathered contract on eBay and ended up getting $260 for it. This is far superior to paying an $175 ETF to Verizon.

The process, once I found a buyer, was:

- I called Verizon and gave his name and phone number.

- He called Verizon to initiate the "assumption of liability".

- He had to call me to get the last four digits of my Social Security number or my password. (I gave the SSN digits, since I didn't have time to replace my Verizon password with something fresh.)

- Verizon sent me a text with a 8 digit password

- I emailed that to my buyer

And, that's it. All done.


P.S. I managed to get the email address of the head of engineering for T-Mobile in Houston. I've also got some excellent mobility traces showing just how broken their network is here. If I don't get enough love from T-Mobile, maybe I'll switch...