Cellular Service - coverage is king

think coverage.  Most of today use a cell phone.  Using a cell phone your almost never out of touch.  When shopping for cellular service we are bedazzled by an endless array of gazillion minute plans and sexy free phones.  Selecting a cellular service provider in this adult play land can seem overwhelming. 

If one of your primary uses of your cell phone is to be used in conjunction with your home office then I submit to you that the single most important aspect of your cellular service is coverage.  If its for business, make sure it can do its business.

Your driving from your home office into town talking to a client, and all of sudden the client voice starts to breakup into little intermittent pieces and then just vanishes, or your talking to your boss on your cell phone from your house, you get from your desk and walk towards the kitchen and your boss vanishes.  All the thousands of low cost minutes and the pretty pictures on the phone shrink to insignificance.  With cellular service coverage is king.

What to do.  Think, ask & test.  Think about how and where you will be using your cell phone.  Will you be using it a lot.  Will it be a main stay of your home office phone strategy, or just a occasional adjunct.  Will a lot of business contacts (clients, bosses, associates) be calling?  Remember, once you give out the number, it's kind of hard to keep people from dialing it.

Will you be using your cellular service from your house, the road into town, a particular major highway, or from all across the country?    The advantage of the cell phone is its not tied to a piece of copper, its mobile.  The disadvantage of a cell phone is its not tied to a piece of copper, and the strength of the signal received and transmitted varies.

Ask your colleagues and friends about the coverage they get from their cellular service providers.  If you neighbors cell phone from XYZ cellular doesn't work in his house, it probably doesn't work in yours.  Ask to borrow it and try a call or two from wherever you need it work.  Hint:  call a landline, it can be impossible to tell who has the problem when one cell phone is calling another. 

Also, ask for, and study the coverage map of a cellular service provider before you buy.  The coverage may not work in all the spots they 'cover.'  Terrain, hills & valleys, buildings, power lines, all play a roll.  On the other hand,  if they say they don't have coverage in an area, then they don't have coverage.

At the end of the day, you want your cellular service to work for you, not against you.