Due to other life things, my cell phone decision was postponed a bit, and I'm glad. During my roadtrip from Austin to Seattle, I had a friend with me using AT&T prepaid. I'm still on a "normal" AT&T plan, and the coverage difference even in voice was noticeable.
I dislike a lot of things about AT&T, but their coverage on contract plans is impossible to beat*. I primarily use AT&T because it's very reliable and I don't pay for the service which is $102/month for 600 minutes, 1000 texts, and unlimited data (throttle at 5GB).
I keep my $30 T-Mobile SIM active because I pay for it, and not my work. Both my AT&T and T-Mobile SIMs are tied to my Google Voice number. I can swap SIMs at will, and nobody would know but me. And, in the unlikely event I leave my job, there isn't going to be any sort of worry about suddenly switching providers or getting new service.
I do make use of the T-Mobile SIM for about a week every month. I do it just to gauge if coverage has improved, or if I'll be in troublesome AT&T areas such as NYC. I'm happy to say that some of the 2G towers in my area have been upgraded to HSPA+ over the past few months, but most of Orange County is still EDGE. I wish T-Mobile the best, but all of AT&T's much larger network has been HSPA+ for years now. Seeing EDGE or GPRS service on your phone is a real downer in 2013.
I can't comment on how well T-Mobile postpaid accounts work with data roaming, but prepaid is pretty bad. They claim you can roam at 2G speeds only and I heard you get a maximum of 250MB per month, but the speeds are terrible. They're so terrible that you might as well not have data roaming.
Another thing that T-Mobile fails at is international roaming. Last time I checked, they wanted $10/MB in Canada and $15/MB in the rest of the world. By contrast, AT&T allows you to buy a bucket of data ($30 for 120MB) which works out to $0.25/MB. Of course, it's always going to be cheaper to get a local SIM. But, for short trips, it's easy and cheap enough to just buy a bucket from AT&T and drop it when you get home.
Overall, I could live with T-Mobile prepaid if I had to. The price has a lot to do with what makes it bearable.
*Among US GSM carriers (I won't ever consider Verizon or Sprint until their base service is LTE and swapping a SIM is the only thing I need to do to switch devices)
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