Apple Watch, cellular or not?

I plan on buying an Apple Watch series 4 one I receive my state or federal tax refund. My main reason is fall detection, if I fall in my home I doubt my cats will call 911. In fact, they are the mostly likely reason I would fall down the stairs.

I have wifi in the house and I have my iPhone with me all of the time when out of the house. Is there any benefit in terms of fall protection to have a cellular Apple watch? I assume that between wifi and my iPhone I’m covered. But what do I know?

I have a 3LTE. As far as I can tell the on board LTE is the very last thing the Watch uses, only if nothing else is available. It prefers using the Phone above its own LTE. I got the LTE because it wasn’t that much more and its there when I forget my Phone, and allows me to deliberately leave my Phone behind in certain cases when it’s convenient.

If you always have the iPhone with you, I don’t think there’s any win to having (and paying for) the cellular watch and associated plan.

If you always have the iPhone with you, I don’t think there’s any win to having (and paying for) the cellular watch and associated plan.

That was my rational for my own watch.

I pay for the watch cell service for my mom and it runs about $14/month from AT&T (once taxes and fees are included), but she pretty much never uses it. The one day she forgot her iPhone at home, she also forgot that she could use her watch for phone calls, so it didn’t much help.

The main idea is that the cellular plan would be good for emergencies, but I’ve heard that even if you don’t activate the service and pay the monthly fee, you can still use it to dial 911. That alone might make it worth the cost of buying the cellular version of the watch. Unless you jog/hike/walk regularly without your phone I don’t think the high monthly fee is worth the cost.

I wanted the Stainless Steel case which only comes with the cell version, so I purchased it but have not activated it with my service provider.

I’ve had problems using wifi for cell coverage with Charter. At times, when I make a call, even using the keypad, I get an instant “CALL FAILED”, without a dial tone or any other sign a call was attempted. Repeating the call or calling another number will yield the same result.

The only solution I’ve found is to reboot the phone (power off - power on).

The Permanent solution was to disable WiFi Calling so I stay on Cellular.

Apparently Charter drops internet service often enough to tick off the protocol stack component of WIFI Calling, requiring a soft reset. Or something. And they DO drop internet service a lot, for short periods.

Charter hasn’t exactly been the flavor of the month in New York State for some time now:

https://buffalonews.com/2019/03/07/charter-gets-another-extension-in-talks-to-keep-its-spectrum-cable-business-in-new-york/

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/18/18146210/charter-spectrum-174-million-settlement-new-york-state-attorney-general-internet-speeds

I didn’t think any ISP could be worse than Time Warner Cable, but they are.

You’d be surprised at how bad the rest can be. I’ve dealt with 5 or 6 over the last 10 years across 4 states. They can all be amazingly bad. I’ve detailed it in other comments here at Tidbits so I’ll not go into details. Let’s just say
that as much as TWC can make me grind my teeth, most of the others seem to be worse. At least in my experience.

But NYC seems to attract bad behavior from ISPs.

We have the option to switch to Verizon FIOS, but everybody we know who did so said it’s even worse than Spectrum.

I suppose it depends where you live. I have had FiOS for 8 years. I was leery at first, but I have never had a complaint about their service.

A few years ago, I had a problem with intermittent dropouts. Verizon technicians worked their butts off to fix it. I had multiple visits over several days. Each technician left his card, and his supervisor’s card, with instructions to call him directly if the problem recurred. I did that, and one of the techs made a return trip the same day. I finally got an email from the supervisor letting me know that other customers had been affected, and they were able to resolve the issue outside my house. But meanwhile, they had replaced every piece of Verizon hardware inside my house. Every Verizon person I dealt with was friendly and anxious to track down the problem.

Acquiring FIOS at my previous residence was probably the best thing that’s happened to my Internet/TV/Phone service ever. No major outages, and the few minor problems were fixed fast and well. Even though I was one of the first adopters. I greatly miss them after moving to an area served by Spectrum (Time Warner / Charter). So :+1: FIOS for me!