MVNOs FTW. They know they're competing for price-conscious consumers so have to offer more value. The big 3 know most of their customers are going to go with one of the big boys, all of whom are expensive and not great.

MVNOs have slower data rates since they buy deprioritized traffic in bulk, don’t have the roaming agreements domestically and especially not internationally, and don’t offer unlimited high speed data.

Hm, not my experience. When traveling internationally there was an option I could have used, but I chose to use a local SIM card instead. The data speeds are just fine for me, and I haven't experienced any issues with roaming domestically.

But then I don't even care about 5g versus 4g/LTE for the most part, so perhaps I'm just not noticing limits that affect others.

That’s how MVNOs work, they buy data in bulk at wholesale prices. But they pay for lower QoS. There isn’t anything wrong with that. But they are getting jankier bandwidth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QoS_Class_Identifier

T-Mobile comes with 5GB of high speed data per month to use for roaming in Canada and Mexico and lower speed data roaming almost anywhere else in the world.

So, maybe don't do business with the worst of them? Of the big 3 in the US, T-Mobile is the one I'd avoid right now.

Verizon is overpriced and is the Comcast equivalent of cellular carriers. AT&T is about as bad

Verizon owns most of the value brands in the US and you made no connection between them and Comcast beyond mentioning them in the same sentence.

AT&T is "about as bad" as what? You gave no information.

Price, customer service

Based on the type of responses you are giving, I actually do believe you probably call your phone company's customer service regularly. So perhaps your criteria might be different. Have you heard of Consumer Cellular?

Consumer cellular rate plans are the same price as T-Mobile and they don’t have international roaming included.

That joke jitterbugged right past you.

You would be surprised how many people on HN will defend crappy products and servjce because of ideals - see Framework laptops, PinePhones etc.

Yeah, those products people are passionate about and really like are total junk. We should mock them while not explaining any of our reasoning, thank you for showing the way.

I explain my reasoning on the Franework laptop for instance - they are bulky, shoddily made, loud, and poor battery life compared to even an M1 MacBook Air.

From what I read, even for x86 laptops, they are for from the best and that’s a really low bar in 2025

> Franework [sic] ... they are for from the best [sic] ... from what I read

That's a lot of typos to just repeat someone else's first hand experience you read about. I guess I should have opinions on Airbus vs. Boeing, too -- mind you, I've never flown a plane, but you know, I've read some stuff online so I'm basically an expert.

Really? While I don’t know anything about flying a plane, I do know when they say something weighs $x, how heavy $x is. I also know that if it has a fan that stays on constantly it’s going to be louder than a laptop that doesn’t have a fan or one that hardly ever comes on.

I know that if they say the laptop last 3 hours on a battery compared to 13+ hours that 13 > 3. I learned that when I was 4 years old.

I also know that if it’s an x86 laptop, that it is going to run hotter than my M2 MacBook Air.

If I read the dimensions of the laptop and read the dimensions of my laptop, I can easily say it’s “bulky”.