The die is cast. Management at work is ordering my new iPhone 5 with service on the company dime…on Verizon. Thus severing a relationship with AT&T going back to 1998, interrupted only by a year on T-Mobile in 2004. So why now, when Verizon has clearly been the top provider in the Bay Area for a decade?
Couple of reasons:
1) LTE. There’s no beating around the bush: Verizon’s LTE deployment is miles and years ahead of AT&T’s. It’s been damn near bulletproof on my iPad, which was the big test. Add to that, this: the Verizon iPhone 5 supports five different LTE bands, including some abroad and some that could conceivably be redeployed in the US. Which is significant because…
2) Verizon’s iPhones are shipping unlocked. You can pop a SIM in them and get service with another carrier – and with either AT&T or T-Mobile, I could get the exact same service currently available on my iPhone 4S, never mind what I might find roaming internationally with my Virgin Mobile SIM. For the first time, I can get a Verizon phone that can not only be used abroad, but with a carrier right here in the US at need. No hardware lock-in makes for a much more convincing case. Plus I can now use the same phone internationally, which means I don’t even have to retain my unlocked 4S for travel abroad.
3) With the proliferation of Wi-Fi on public transit, it’s now possible for me to have some form of Wi-Fi connection all the way to work except for the portions on foot or on Caltrain. This takes away a lot of the disadvantage of CDMA at being unable to do voice and data simultaneously. (And since that advantage is technically nonexistent on LTE, I expect that to cease to be a problem as Verizon shifts more and more of its network to LTE.) Hell, there’s free Wi-Fi at the mall, at every coffee shop, at the airport (and about !-ing time), all over Googleburg – no reason not to use it.
4) Apple has supposedly beaten the longstanding issues with battery life on CDMA devices – to all accounts, the iPhone 5 is an all-day device. How true that will be with my usage patterns remains to be seen, but for the time being there’s no reason to think I won’t be able to get by with the new gadget. Even on my existing 4S on AT&T, the battery performance under iOS 6 seems to have improved.
But the biggest criterion of all:
5) I’m not paying for it. Whatever the merits of VZW’s plans or data provision or what have you – it’s somebody else’s problem now. My subsidy will go away but I’ll still be a net $40 a month to the good as a result of finally taking the work phone.
Now I just have to wait for company approvals and for the thing to actually ship. Which by my calculations means I’ll have it just in time for Thanksgiving…