Selecting a mobile phone plan is not easy. It's hard enough to choose a plan for yourself, and it becomes even more complicated when you have to make a decision for an entire agency. It seems as if cellular phone carriers make it needlessly complicated to compare one company's plan with another. That probably partially explains why wireless companies constituted the second lowest-ranked industry in a University of Michigan customer satisfaction index report (only cable television companies are disliked more).

Another reason for this complexity is that cellular phone networks in the United States still lack consistent quality and coverage, because of the country's size and ...