Important Precursor: I list the carriers below in the order I would recommend them to a friend asking for new service. There truly is no "best" carrier for everyone and everyone's needs. It all depends on where you want to use your phone and which services you care about. Even the "Best" carrier in Oregon may have terrible coverage where you need it. Get information from friends and neighbors, and make good use of the 14 day trial period where you can quit without penalty. Note, some carriers may have a longer trial period, but be sure to check before you buy.

What Does Dan Care About? Being able to use your phone in the most situations. Nowadays that includes using data.

Outside of Oregon, who do I think is best nationally? 1) Verizon, 2) AT&T, Tied for 3) are Sprint and T-Mobile. All of them can be good depending on your needs.

Data Coverage: I think it would be great if carriers weren't permitted to show any data coverage at all unless it was at least 3G. A modern smart-phone simply won't be able do much that is useful using any 2G data technology. I'd love to see faithful data maps, and if they excluded 2G, I think you'd see a more accurate representation of what you can use. By the way, if this happened, both T-Mobile and AT&T would lose big chunks of coverage but it would be worse with T-Mobile. Perhaps this could "shame" these guys into upgrading these rural areas. Big kudos to Verizon, who really have long since eliminated 2G-only coverage even in very rural spots.

Verizon -Overall

Verizon's LTE footprint is bar-none the largest in the USA. I'd characterize their LTE speed in Oregon as below average, but consistent. Users likely see 1 to 5Mb/s with a few locations having significantly faster connections. Verizon's older 3G data network tends to be reliable and comes in at about .5Mb/s to 1Mb/s on average. Verizon isn't rocking fast and never has been (at least for my uses), but their consistency and availability have been exceptional. Verizon is the most likely to have any signal at all in rural locations, and most-likely to have LTE in rural locations. Perhaps not surprisingly, the rocking fast data I do experience on Verizon tend to be these remote rural locations with fewer users.

Verizon currently operates two voice networks. Their traditional CDMA 1X which is still the default (dominant) one for now, and a Voice over LTE or VoLTE voice network too. Their traditional voice network is by far and away the most reliable voice network I've ever used. Some of us have gone years without dropping a call and never hearing all-circuits-busy (or congestion related issues). Of course the future is packet-driven and VoLTE and its successors. VoLTE on Verizon for me gets a grade of C-. Good, bad or indifferent, Verizon chose not to implement circuit-switched fall-back. This means a call started on VoLTE will drop if the signal gets weak, even if it could otherwise be carried by the CDMA 1x network in the same location. So the rock-solid voice reputation will take a hit to a certain extent depending on how reliable LTE is in your area. The good side of VoLTE is that by its nature, one can do voice and data at the same time. Notably, the Verizon iPhone 6 is the first iPhone that can do voice and data simultaneously.

AT&T's LTE network is significantly smaller than Verizon's. AT&T's 3G network can be very fast so a better measure is AT&T LTE plus their high speed 3G areas compared to Verizon LTE. Even so, I'd hazard a guess that AT&T's high speed coverage by geographic area is much smaller than Verizons. AT&T still has hundreds of miles (albeit in rural locations) of 2G GPRS/EDGE which is too slow to be usable for modern applications. While AT&T's coverage footprint is comparable to Verizon's I don't consider its quality to be on-par. AT&T can be very inconsistent for data speeds -- it's either rocking fast or really slow, even in some 3G or better areas. Don't get me wrong, AT&T is still at the top of the heap in competition with geographic coverage that is very good. AT&T's pricing tends to be better than Verizon and I see them as a better overall value for many consumers that don't need paramount coverage and rural data speed. AT&T does have some locations of coverage where Verizon doesn't (the opposite being more true-- Verizon has more areas of unique coverage than AT&T). Overall rating for AT&T is a "B" AT&T's customer service is generally good but again more hit or miss than Verizon in my experience.

Sound quality on T-Mobile (in-town) is outstanding. Voice quality is generally good where available.

Trust is hard to earn and really easy to break. Like most folks, I've been consistently delighted by John Legere's consumer friendly uncarrier initiatives. The reason we love them is that they speak the truth. This cellular industry uses people's lack of understanding to make money, and the uncarrier initiatives are (ostensibly) all about doing something straight forward that consumers can understand and that makes sense.

The trust (at least for me) was recently broken. The FCC had to ask T-Mobile to accurately report speed-test data to their consumers. Here's why that is so wrong: When one gets throttled for going over their 4G allotment, the easiest technological way to do this is to restrict *all* of their traffic to the reduced speed. In order for T-Mobile to show fast network speed for speed-tests once someone has been throttled, they would would need to create an exception. The short of it is that there is no accidental way this could of happened. They're currently in the press presenting themselves as the "good guys" for complying with the FCC request to fix this. I say, they're no better than the competition. Further, they've been ventured for cramming (billing for services the user didn't order). These violations of trust really do matter.