I have had a good experience with TracFone for several years now - almost always a signal, with some service holes like near Susan's home. The available phones are pretty basic, although they recently came out with a couple models (Samsung?) that seem to have a few more features (web browsing etc), which I do enough of that I don't really want to do it from my phone, but whatever floats your boat... The tradeoff though is in runtime - I love that I can charge my phone once or twice a week. And the whole process of admining a phone account on the Internet is very slick, I have added #1 son and that has gone pretty well through a succession of lost or bricked cell phones, all son-induced...

I also have a second phone / account with Sprint, and my experience has been different than reported earlier in the post - good customer service, and great coverage at least in the PNW and other areas I travel. The phone (smartphone Palm Pre) I have mixed views on, its great for navigation (which I sometimes need driving to fire scenes), great for email access, pretty good for apps (e.g. I don't need an app for everything in life, so weather tracking / forecasts, and a few specialized ones are enough for me), poor for battery life.