I need to kick T-Mobile to the curb. I've been with Simple Mobile, a T-Mobile MVNO, for a year now and have been very dissatisfied with T-Mobile's network and service quality here in central Texas. Wherever I go more often than not I get one bar (if even), maybe two if I get lucky, and data speeds are abysmal most of the time. I can make phone calls over their network just fine but using VOIP services such as Facetime, Teams, or WhatsApp to make a simple phone call (re: not even a video call but a simple audio-only conversation) often ends disastrous and in constant flow of can you hear me nows. Even simple things as sending a photo via iMessage or WhatsApp often takes minutes and multiple attempts. In my house I have decent reception on one end (36 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up) and pretty much nothing on the other (2 Mbps down, 0.3 Mbps up). I was with AT&T before, and their network and service quality was much better than T-Mobile's, but I cannot go back for moral and political reasons that I don't want to get into now.
At this point, after struggling for a full year with T-Mobile, I am not really concerned with prices anymore, and I'd much rather pay more for good service that I can use when I need it than less for shoddy service that fails me whenever I try to rely on it. The best network in my neighborhood and my part of town is Verizon anyway, and since I spend most of my time in this area I am now looking at Verizon MVNOs. As we speak, I am paying $62 for two phones with Simple Mobile (2x 5GB plan) and am looking at $64 for Total Wireless (30GB shared), $78 for Tracfone (2x 10GB plan), $78 for Verizon prepaid (2x 15GB), or $132 for Verizon postpaid.
Does anyone have experience with Total Wireless and Tracfone, the latter specifically on the Verizon network? I would be particularly interested in how bad the congestion throtting is when compared to Verizon's own prepaid and postpaid plans.