Going to Trucking School, And Need Advice!

I've had good experiences with Verizon. I'm not crazy about their rates but the thing with Verizon is their coverage. I haven't seen anyone yet who can beat their coverage area/signal strength, and that's pretty important when most of your trips are going to take you somewhere in the middle of BFE.

Also, keep in mind that many of your major truck stop chains have wifi now; in fact, Pilot/Flying J typically has free wifi inside the building (but you'll still have to pay once you're in the parking lot and in your sleeper). It may not always be the best, though; there is going to be a butt-load of traffic on their routers so you mileage may vary. Also, I think they still throttle (or even block) certain data-intensive applications (like Bittorrent or most MMORPG's) so, if you're a gamer, that may be of some concern to you.

Hopefully someone has a better answer, but this has been my personal experience to date.

 

Verizon does have better coverage across the country than other providers, and their frequency range is a little lower than other providers so it gets more distance between towers, and has better penetration (EDIT for clarity here - by lower, I mean they have a longer wavelength, hence better range and penetration). I'd be very wary of their new unlimited data plans though, as in the fine print there's a good bit about having your traffic set as unprioritized after using a certain amount of data per month (per line) - meaning if your devices are reporting to a tower with a load of traffic (especially during busier parts of the day) you're going to get horrible latency. Those new unlimited packages were designed to entice those out there still on their grandfathered truely unlimited data packages to switch off, as they want to get rid of them.

If you go with them, I'd recommend running a larger data package in the beginning and track your utilization to see if you can pair down a bit - saving the large file downloads for when you can crack on to someone else's wifi, and keeping your music local on your device will make a huge difference here too.

A lot... I mean A LOT of verizon's profits come from customers not understanding their plans and the tools they have available to keep from going into overage. Whatever plan you choose - make SURE you turn on safety mode and leave it on. If for some reason you're on a smaller plan and need more data that month you can always bump up a tier to cover you till your data resets and have it automagically go back to your normal plan at the beginning of the next cycle - but if you don't have safety mode turned on, you'll get all that data and then get the bill - if you catch it before the end of the bill cycle the only option at that point IS to bump up to a high enough tier to cover the overage. At least with safety mode you have a choice.

Also be wary of contracts - they say they don't do contracts anymore, but when you're looking into a device like a hotspot, it will need it's own line - a lot of times sales reps will say the device is free and not mention you're signing yourself into a commitment to keeping that extra line on the account for a year or 2, and will be stuck with the cost of that line obligation if you decide to switch carriers. (and don't ever believe the tablets are free... either, same deal).

One more thing on their plans - if you think you'll be running into Canada, make sure you either get on a larger data package that includes Canada and Mexico at no additional cost, or have a smaller plan and make sure you have that option enabled for the infrequent times that you do travel over the border - international roaming fees are ridiculous, and easy to avoid with them if you know ahead of time and set up your account accordingly.