When I switched to T-Mobile a few years ago for my cell phone service, I wasn’t too worried about coverage. Around the cities they’re pretty much as good as anyone else. However, the first time we took a trip out of town we realized how woefully inadequate they are in rural areas. Time has marched on, and they’ve made a lot of progress is covering more remote areas, but beyond voice calling, data services are slow and weak.

However, I love T-Mobile and all of the added services that they give you, such as free music streaming and no data overage charges. The other day a thought came to me: My tablet is an LTE tablet, so why not convert that over to Verizon instead of T-Mobile, and that can be my internet gateway when I’m out of town.

Today the SIM chip arrived and I popped it in. I wanted to see how Verizon’s network has kept up with T-Mobile’s speed in metro areas. I was surprised to see that Verizon was astoundingly fast on download speeds. It felt far short on upload speed, but that’s not as big a concern to me.

The big test will be on some of our upcoming weekend trips out of town. I’m going to check out how the tablet’s signal compares to T-Mobile, and see if Verizon’s coverage really is that good. Plus, if I need internet signal in an area where T-Mobile is weak, this will give us options for looking up maps or searching for hotels and restaurants.

One final note, I love how so many devices are carrier agnostic now. It was a simple SIM chip swap to be up and running on a different carrier.