I'm normally happy with T-Mobile in the cities, but after a cross-country road trip I'm pretty disappointed with their service in the Great Plains and PNW. My traveling companion consistently had service with LTE with AT&T while I was on edge or 3G. On the East Coast and Midwest my T-Mobile service is stellar. I probably won't switch anything because 99% of my time I'm in the Chicago city limits, but it was a bit disappointing to have to drive without streaming services or podcasts.
I drove from Indiana to Seattle two years ago while on Tmobile. I really only had issues in the mountains, in National Parks (yellowstone really, the badlands were fine for the most part, and had full LTE at Mt. Rushmore), and chunks of South Dakota.
Out of curiosity, does your phone support Band 12? Because they have been really pushing that rollout which roughly triples their range and building penetration, so I wonder if that could account for our different experiences.
Not sure, it's an iPhone 6s. Sure a lot of the places were a little bit out there (Eastern Washington, Badlands, Southern Utah, Yellowstone) but my friend was nearly at full service the entire time (aside from mountains). We ended up just installing Spotify on her iPad and logging in with my account :)
Yeah, I never have been big on podcasts but ever since they added it to Spotify I've actually discovered a bunch of great stuff. Makes those long drives when you can't agree on music easier.
Yeah, as an avid camper, backpacker, climber, or general outdoor person knows, you need at least one person with Verizon in your party. Tmobile is not great at all outside of cities.
A lot of Chicago's population loss is on the South Side where violence is high. Also the elimination of the projects has moved a lot of Section 8 housing to the suburbs, as it gives low income families a chance at a better life in a less dire situation. Investment in new infrastructure is at an all time high in the Loop / North / West sides. Young people are moving out the suburbs and into the core. Chicago's population isn't increasing at the rate of places like Houston because of the lack of annexation, the suburbs in Cook County generally don't want to join the city.
Why would you think that this has anything to do with IBM's consulting arm and not the fact that IBM maintains their own JVM and employ a ton of JVM experts to develop and maintain it. Jigsaw was a great idea but poor in execution. I feel for the people who put their effort into it and hope that some of the work can be salvaged for the future, but this is one of the cases where it's not worth it to rush through an incomplete solution.
The point I now made several times is that it's one of the two major projects that turned kickstarter into a popular platform. It was extremely successful at the time it was released and while projects have since outranked SC in most spend on Kickstarter, it's still one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns of all time by any financial measure.
As for "not released", they've released a lot more than other projects have. Colossal failures such as Everquest Next have absolutely nothing to show for it - if SC stops development tomorrow (which is unlikely), they have in fact released an early stage game and a ton of near-game content.
