If you're genuinely in a US Cellular primary coverage area, I'm sorry to tell you that you don't really have too much choice. Your only bog standard alternatives would be a Verizon or Sprint MVNO that provided roaming services on US Cellular. Both Selectel and Ting CDMA do that, but using a carrier that provides roaming on USCC with primary coverage on another network is not entirely going to be a workable solution if the majority of your time is spent roaming off that primary network. Service quality will suffer, and you won't have data services available as the roaming only covers voice minutes and SMS messaging.
The guide can't help everyone on carrier switching. Where it fails on that, however, it can still be useful to potentially reduce costs anyway through optimization methods and only paying for what you need. USCC doesn't offer non-"unlimited" talk and text plans, but they do have a tiered billing situation with data. Try to use as little data as possible, and see how your existing plan's pricing compares to the plans they're currently offering for what you use.
Because of time differences, he is available when we're at work so we really want to keep a phone plan that can use Skype. Any suggestions?
You either have mobile data services available or you don't. So long as you have sufficient bandwidth in your location, low enough latency, and enough data available on the account with the carrier chosen, Skype should work with anyone.
Theoretically, it might be worth looking into Google Fi for you, but it's not a service I recommend without considerable caveats and concerns, especially for people in your situation. It's expensive to buy into, Google tries to datamine the everlovin' living daylights out of people these days, and though they offer US Cellular roaming, it's LTE roaming only, which may or may not work for your location. USCC is running two separate networks, after all - CDMA and LTE. The coverage between the two aren't 100% interchangeable. There also can be some schizophrenic connection issues at times with call quality in some areas. UMA and VoLTE services are industry standards for voice calls over data connections, they're mature technologies, but Google's implementation leaves a bit to be desired on execution due to their signal strength and connection algorithms, which tend to suffer the most in non-urban areas. Also, if the map shows you in a 2G area, data services aren't going to be sufficient on their own to support Skype - you'd need a WiFi connection with solid internet access. Given how expensive the buy-in can be, even getting the phones used, I'd be remiss to offer it as a magic bullet solution or tell you to go all in on the service.
Sorry it's not happier news. Best of luck all the same, though!
