Well, I reached my breaking point with T-Mobile yesterday. Traveling home from Newark, Ohio to Cincinnati, I had 10 calls drops. 5 of those calls were with one person, trying to complete a 10-minute phone call. 1 of those was calling 6-1-1 to report my troubles.

A couple of weeks ago, I called Time Warner to make a change to our cable service. I was told I had a 5-10 minute hold time. After 8 minutes, my call dropped. Mind you, I'm on pre-paid right now... so that was a waste of 8 minutes. I tried to call 6-1-1 to report the issue and get a credit. But the call dropped 3 times while trying to call 6-1-1. I finally said the heck with it... the time and frustrating of trying to get through to 6-1-1 was not worth the $1 or so they'd credit my account.

Yesterday, my second attempt of getting to 6-1-1 was successful. They credited back $2.28 to my account -- whoopty-doo. She told me they had 8 towers down in Columbus and 4 in Cincinnati -- Ohio is in bad shape right now, but they expect service to be restored within 8 hours. I told her, "I appreciate that you can identify the problem and that you have an estimate in place for when it will be corrected. But this doesn't rectify my situation." Then I told her that over the past 14 months with T-Mobile, I have rarely been able to sustain service for any more than 30 minutes without a dropped call. The call drops, phone shows 0 service... and then poof -- full service. Place the call again... a few minutes later, drop!

Arrgh. So, I finally bit the bullet. I'll be paying $70/month for 2 phones, 700 minutes with Verizon. Quite a bit more than what I want to be paying or what I think I should be paying, considering we use about 350 minutes per month - MAX. But yesterday, quality of service surpassed cost on the list of priorities for cell phone service.

I've heard good things about Verizon... even though, ironically, David Spade just complained about Verizon on The ShowBiz Show last night. So wish me luck!