Cell Coverage in NE Tacoma

Erik over at www.erikemery.com is drooling over the upcoming iPhone. It does seem to provide quite a few features and looks pretty cool. I own a decent cell phone and use some of its non phone related features like games, text messaging and the camera. From what is coming up around the technology corner, we might believe that soon our cell phones will be making our breakfast and parking our cars. However this morning I took an online survey which gave me pause.

As I have mentioned before, I call online surveys “voluntary data entry”. Every time you or I fill one out there is that much more information about us available to a larger group of companies and people. And yet, I still will occasionally fill them out.

This morning before work I chose to spend five minutes of my life providing personal information to a survey being conducted off of an ESPN pop up solicitation. It was in regards to get streamed television to your cell phone, a service the Verizon is now touting.

I didn’t know it was Verizon when I started the survey, but it became clear after several questions what the purpose of the questions were. Would I be interested in switching to Verizon for this video service? The funny thing is that I have always LOVED Verizon for their clarity and coverage around the NW, but I don’t use them as my cell company. I have Cingular, which I listed as having a somewhat unfavorable opinion of, due to the overall quality of my connections through them.

But Verizon doesn’t provide coverage for my neighborhood in NE Tacoma. I have a hard time with any decent connection as soon as I near my home. It works great everywhere else I’ve tried and it has never dropped me in the past when I would drive up to Seattle. I even tried to switch back to them during a trial period, but no go for NE Taco.

I don’t know whether I would go for the streamed TV over the phone. I do like Cingular’s family plan, which I use. But when it comes down to it, it is about the phone calls. Everything else is just a bonus.