Lets talk about the quality of service or lack thereof of t-mobile.

I just signed up with T-mobile and dropped AT&T because T-mobile has the 1700 3G frequency.

I was feeling very happy that I switched because now i will have 3.5g but now that I have been with T-mobile for about 2.5 days I am starting to regret it.

I have some issues and I want to see if you guys have those issues too.

I realize that cell phone frequencies are easy to block but I am next to a window when I am at home and I'm about 2 or 3 miles from the T-mobile office I signed up with.

I am at 1 to 3 bars (most of the time 1 or 2 bars) EDGE now where as before with AT&T I was at very lowest 3 bars edge.

When I am at 1 or 2 bars edge on T-mobile at home it is as though I have no connection.

3 to 4 minutes to find and load yahoo.com? Other simple websites like this just to test the connection are sooooo slow it is unbearable. 3+ minutes just to load first home page is very unnacceptable.

To top this off, If I tether to my PC using Nokia PC Suite it seems to let me access for about 2 minutes then completely shuts down all access for Firefox Browser to the internet but still shows access on the N900 and on PC Suite says connected. It is as though I am getting blocked because I am tethering.

The other thing I noticed is that when i connect to T-mobile it says 3.5g for first 5 to 10 seconds then goes to 3g then goes to 2.5g then starts dropping bars until i get all the way down to 1 bar.

As far as I am concerned that is "bait and switch" and it is really pissing me off.

MY solutions in just these 2 hours that I finally got pissed off was....

1) I mounted/placed my N900 into a Gorillapod (google it) and stuck it up as high as possible on my corner desk. It is now 2.5 feet from the ceiling and it shows 5 bars edge.

2) I went to opendns.org and got their primary and secondary DNS servers and entered theirs
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
into the T-mobile dns addresses instead of relying on t-mobiles DNS servers.
I got immediately better, faster results from doing these 2 things.

I am in Ventura county just outside of Los Angeles county and we have had heavy storms here just yesterday and today in Cali so I am really, really, really hoping that this is just intermittent service outages because the rain and wind is causing problems but I'd like to get some of your opinions.

Has T-mobile dropped the ball for you with poor area coverage, signal strength?
Are they blocking you when you tether? Have you tried using open dns servers? Do you see a difference?

Please bluntly and without any regret say any dissatisfaction you have with T-mobiles service. You are after all paying them good money to get internet access.