Dear HT, Another person on this list just emailed me to find out what I had heard back in response to my original posting, so I am posting the replies below. I'll leave out the people's names in case they had wanted to be anonymous. Best, Jonathon reply 1: I use the Sprint MVNO Ting.com. I have recommended them many times. Tethering is included. They have a pay for what you use method. My two phones total about $55/mo. Up to $65 on a high data month. My parents phones total less. Their customer service is #1. They are no-contract. I follow this industry as a hobby interest and have never heard of the prioritization you mention. I don't think it would work. reply 2: Have not used Straight Talk but do use PagePlus, which is another Verizon MVNO. We used to use family plan at $12 / line with 300 minutes. 255 texts, and 10 megs of data per line; have upgrade to 3000, 3000, and 500megs at $29.95 per line now. For four lines that is now not that much different from what ATT and VZ are offering, but we're happy with the service and seldom approach the limits. I have never known of issues with lower quality of connections compared with Verizon. They do block tethering, but there are a couple apps that purport to allow tethering. They do restrict international calls and data, so you should check the specific international locales you are interested in. Puerto Rico and USVI will cost around 60 cents / minute, I believe. On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 9:05 PM, Jonathon Podolsky < producer at wholehealthexpo.com> wrote: > Dear HT, > > I have heard from salespeople at three different stores that cell phone > companies give top priority for calls on their towers to their own contract > customers first, then to pay as you go customers that pay through them, and > lastly to pay as you go customers who go through third parties (MVNO) like > Straight Talk etc. Some of the Straight Talk phones use the Verizon network > (it states this on the package) so it might be a good deal, but I want to > make sure it doesn't get a lower level of service if the tower is busy. > (Also apparently Straight Talk doesn't allow tethering nor international > roaming but can switch sim cards to use foreign carries I believe). A > friend of mind in the industry thinks it is not legal to give access > priority to different levels of customers (pre-pay vs post-pay, or MVNO), > and government preemption is generally in time of crisis only. Does anyone > have further knowledge on whether or not cell phone carriers can provide > different levels of priority for use of their towers? > > Best, > Jonathon > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.hidden-tech.net/pipermail/hidden-discuss/attachments/20141222/97939e77/attachment.html