Last August I jumped ship on T-Mobile, and GSM carriers all together. The reason? I was moving to Miami and Verizon has EVDO coverage down here and the Samsung i730, a great Pocket PC Phone. Here is a picture of a speed test that I was kind of disappointed with:
I'm at work right now, and couldn't get a faster test than that. I was pretty disappointed, but realized that any GSM carriers' data speeds won't even come close to that. EDGE is about half that, and UMTS maxes out at about that speed (but isn't available anywhere really, and costs an arm and a leg). My fastest speed test with EVDO is 968kbps. I have yet to break the 1MB mark though.
So that got me thinking. How important is data speed to our average user? Obviously it was important enough for me to switch not only carriers but technologies. I used to hate the whole concept of CDMA. It just seemed overpriced and to difficult to switch phones. And there were very few Windows Mobile devices available for CDMA service. Obviously my opinion has changed and I don't have any plans for the near future to switch back to GSM service. Verizon seems to have the market of cool new devices cornered here in the US, and I can't imagine going without EVDO-speed data anymore. I'll be interested to see the results of how important data is to the MGN users.