That is a tough call. I frequent West LA, reside near East LA and work in the San Gabriel Valley. All carriers seem to have excellent coverage (T-Mo has come on strong in the past few years). I have a few buds who swear by Sprint as it was the only service capable of reception in their underground UCLA labs. Nextel had always given me poor range, even after the Sprint buyout. EDGE can be found nearly everywhere in the Greater LA area. Not so with EV-DO. Your theoretical bitrate transfer (EV-DO vs. EDGE) may be higher, but you may not realize that higher transfer rate in the areas which you roam. How you maintain your device is also important to the perceived speed of the network. I opted out of my Sprint contract and made a conscious decision to go with Cingular three months ago. See the last page of
BENCHMARK your BlackBerry speed! and note that I returned some of the highest, if not
the highest device benchmark across any platform, of any device. Your perceived advantage in speed may easily be negated by a poorly maintained device.