My problems with nextel did not stop when I canceled my service. I will get to the problems with the service. When I went to get a new phone a day before my contract expired, I of course wanted to keep my number. So as I went to get my Cingular phone (highly recommended), I had the old number switched to my new number. Today, I get in the mail my nextel statement for the month with a $200 early termination even though I had not canceled my service, but had simply got a new phone and switched my number over. This was on icing on the cake after 2 years of absolutely amazingy bad service from nextel. In my town, not a small town by any means, there are very few places that have any service. In the largest subdivision, you cannot get service anywhere. I constantly get comments from people trying to reach me that get the classic nextel line...Please hold while the nextel subscriber you are trying to reach is located. Most of the time I would not even recieve incoming calls, calls would go straight to my voice mail. Not only would I not get the calls, but often I would not even get the voice mails until days or even weeks later. When I did actually take calls (and call out), I cannot count the number of times I've had my call dropped. I recieved so many different error messages sometimes I wonder if they just spend all their time at nextel thinking of different error messages to program into their phones. That brings me to the selling point of nextel, the famed and well-loved direct connect feature. This is an absolute joke. Direct connect only works MAYBE half the time I tried to use it. Even then, in the middle of the conversation I would be greeted by the loud beep of my phone telling me I wont be talking to that person anymore. Of course, I would expect nothing less from the nextel network. Text messaging with nextel is next to impossible. If it did not take hours to send or recieve a message, it took days, or maybe didn't even come at all. The internet access was fine, it the rare instance that it worked. Of course, when you don't have service, you don't get the internet access either. I was constantly getting the message "network not available". Calling and trying to complain to nextel is futile. Trying to get through to customer service takes forever and once you get through they do nothing. My experience with nextel has been nothing short of a disaster and I write this trying to warn anyone considering nextel. Stick with Verizon or Cingular and you will be much happier in the end. Don't make the same mistake I did.