Cell phonesFollow

They're also in East TN, but not Middle. My husband had them and when we drove to see my parents, his phone was useless about an hour out of our home area.

Crazy woman.

I also have Verizon and have never had any problems. Of course, it's free (for me anyway) so anything is good I suppose...

One of the things to realize about larger coverage networks is that they have different generations of tech running their base stations. There's always going to be a tradeoff between going with the network that has the latest generation system (with all the attendant bugs that entails) versus one that has rock solid performance, but is a generation behind. AT&T tends to lag behind Verizon, but gets more mileage out of what they're using as a result. Which you prefer is up to you.

The reason why the Iphone came out on AT&T only was partly contract deals, but mostly because the initial Iphone was a 2G phone with lots of built in hardware to make it seem like a better phone. They didn't need a 3G network and AT&T was the logical choice in the US to go with. They seem to be sticking with that decision and are upgrading to 3G in sync with AT&T. At least so far...