I used to be in the cell phone biz. It amazes me that Alltel can make better offers than Verizon, if , as you say, they are renting time from Verizon. BTW, I love Verizon for the coverage, hate them for the customer service - but the only thing better in CS is TMobile, consistently rated best by JDPowers, but their network is not nearly as good, and GSM stinks compared to CDMA.

On the other hand, it makes it a more solid network that uses CDMA, which is going to better be able to resist any change to the inferior GSM tandard.

I work for Alltel. The announcement this morning has a lot of us on our toes looking for what will happen next. I tend to agree that we do have a much superior customer service experience. However, we are all human and it depends on who you get on the other end of the line when you dial into a customer service center. As for alltel already being on Verizon towers that is not always true. In the majority of cases that isn’t true at all. We all seek to co-locate on other carriers towers to avoid the long drawn out process of building a new site. Not to many residents or communities want anything to do with a tower in the line of site of their home or community. I could see a major benifit to coverage for customers. We have holes that they cover and vise versa. Most of us are concerned at this point as to what will happen to our jobs in areas where we overlap in A band CDMA coverage of Verizon and the B band areas that belong to Alltel. We both are entrenched very well in the area I manage. I can only hope that my employees and I still have jobs once this is all said and done.

I remember a sales guy trying to sell me a Monster Cable. I had to tell him that I work in a TV station, and we don’t use gold plated connectors on anything (Except perhaps the center conductor on a BNC connector)

If we used those big thick cables for audio, our cable troughs would have to be 10 times larger.

Also the Bi-Metallic corrosion of contacts is fun. That’s why you use tin with tin and gold with gold.