Nyecodem said:
I was actually reading up on the S4 last night and there seems to be some conflicting information online (shocker!). Apparently Sprint has banned their small 3rd party vendors from re-activating the Galaxy S4 as a BYOD because it's basically "too new". So Sprint is out of the question. T-Mobile on the other hand has a very open policy towards Bring Your Own Device plans, but the S4 isn't supported. Even though some sources say the S4 contains GSM radios, I believe (you have to verify this) Sprint uses CDMA. Checking the list of supported devices on T-Mobile's BYOD site shows that the S4 is missing. And while people may say that T-Mobile's network sucks, their policy towards download limits (which you said isn't an issue) is very friendly from what a friend told me. She was even tethering her Galaxy S3 to her laptop in lieu of a wired internet connection without consequence. And when she exceeded her 2GB download limit she could still use it for data, just at non-3G speeds.
Another article I read claimed that Verizon doesn't make things easy for people to go on their BYOD plan, which I believe is prepaid only. Customer reps didn't know they offered it, and even Verizon stores had a hard time doing it. Part of that issue was that some Verizon stores, while appearing all corporate and legit, are actually franchises of some kind. The same goes for AT&T though (maybe). Long story short is you're better off going into a store and asking directly, but remain noncommittal. Get everything in writing or at the very least have them direct you to their website explaining all the terms and conditions.
Finally, I like Verizon a great deal because we were using them for corporate phones at my last job. They were simply friendlier and had better coverage where my sales reps were located. We also used AT&T, and when their network goes down, it's usually catastrophic. There were two outages in one month on AT&T a couple years back, and the only solution was to switch your phone to 2G. The official explanation was that an engineer disabled a single piece of equipment, shutting down the entire 3G network in Southwest Florida.
