I'm in Chandler and I'm considering Straight Talk. I currently have Sprint and as you said, Sprint is Sloooooooow and has been getting worse. You know it is bad when you have an Airave and it still sometimes roams haha How is your ST service in the area?
Well, I'm not actually on ST, but rather, T-Mo prepaid. But my service with T-Mo has been quite good, so far: WAY faster data and pretty decent voice coverage in Phoenix metro. I would imagine that ST on the T-Mo SIM (you choose whether you want an AT&T or T-Mo SIM when signing up) would behave identically because it's accessing the exact same network.
I might consider BYOD with ST at a later date after I've tread the waters a bit with my data usage. ST arbitrarily soft-caps data usage (2-3GB for most people) and sends shutoff warnings if they think you're being a pig (they don't have a way to throttle, apparently). T-Mo simply just throttles down to 2G/EDGE after you exceed your high-speed limit. But so far, I've only been using about 30MB per day worth of mobile data, according to my device because I'm not very big on mobile streaming.
I guess ST CDMA is out of the question haha I'm now seriously considering the $30 T-Mobile deal for Unlimited data, text and 100 minutes and also getting a cheap VZW pre-paid flip phone for calls in the event that the T-Mobile phone doesn't get service in an emergency.
The $30 T-Mo plan is a good deal, as long as you don't plan on talking much. You can supplement the lack of voice minutes with Google Voice + a VoIP app (like Groove IP), but the quality isn't anything I'd consider great over a mobile network. I'm currently on T-Mo's $60 prepaid plan (unlimited talk/text + 2GB high-speed data) and I got a $5/mo. discount for the first 6 months when I signed up (not sure if they're still offering that).